Securing networked control systems: Modeling attacks and defenses

Abstract

Networked Control Systems (NCS) have emerged as a viable solution to effectively manage critical infrastructures in smart cities and modern industrial settings. The networked architecture of NCS that facilitates the communication between its distributed components makes them vulnerable to cyber attacks. The vulnerabilities in the communication network coupled with safety critical nature of data necessitates the need to develop models to analyze the impact of cyber attacks on system stability and performance. In this work, we develop an analytical model for Denial of Service (DoS) and Deception attacks in NCS. Based on the insights from the model, we propose a mechanism based on symmetric key encryption to secure NCS from such attacks. The comparison of our security mechanism with the standard reference signal demonstrates that our approach is successful in securing the NCS with minimal performance overhead.