Detection and isolation of routing attacks through sensor watermarking

Abstract

In networked control systems, leveraging the peculiarities of the cyber-physical domains and their interactions may lead to novel detection and defense mechanisms against malicious cyber-attacks. In this paper, we propose a multiplicative sensor watermarking scheme, where each sensor's output is separately watermarked by a Single Input Single Output (SISO) filter. Hence, such scheme does not require communication between multiple sensors, but can still lead to detection and isolation of malicious cyber-attacks. In particular, we analyze the benefits of the proposed watermarking scheme for two attack scenarios: The physical sensor re-routing attack and the cyber measurement re-routing one. For each attack scenario, detectability and isolability properties are analyzed with and without the proposed watermarking scheme and we show how the watermarking scheme can be leveraged to detect cyber sensor routing attacks. In order to detect compromised sensors, we design an observer-based detector with a robust adaptive threshold. Additionally, we identify the sensors involved in the re-routing attacks by means of a tailored Recursive Least Squares parameter estimation algorithm. The results are illustrated through a numerical example.