Optimal Stealth Attacks to Cyber-Physical Systems: Seeking a Compromise between Maximum Damage and Effort

This paper aims at modeling the optimal behavior for an attacker that has the objective to maliciously manipulate the output of an industrial power plant, which is fed via a public network to a digital twin in order to reconstruct the state. In particular, we consider a scenario where the attacker seeks a tradeoff between two conflicting objectives: dealing the maximum damage in terms of the norm of the estimation error for the observer and keeping the magnitude of the variation of the systems' output to a minimum. In doing so, we assume the observer is equipped with a bad data detector and the attacker must choose the injected signals in a way that guarantees that the bad data detection condition is not triggered. Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)