Model-based security analysis of a water treatment system

An approach to analyzing the security of a cyber-physical system (CPS) is proposed, where the behavior of a physical plant and its controller are captured in approximate models, and their interaction is rigorously checked to discover potential attacks that involve a varying number of compromised sen...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kang, Eunsuk, Adepu, Sridhar, Jackson, Daniel, Mathur, Aditya P.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/114444
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0194-3989
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4864-078X
Description
Summary:An approach to analyzing the security of a cyber-physical system (CPS) is proposed, where the behavior of a physical plant and its controller are captured in approximate models, and their interaction is rigorously checked to discover potential attacks that involve a varying number of compromised sensors and actuators. As a preliminary study, this approach has been applied to a fully functional water treatment testbed constructed at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. The analysis revealed previously unknown attacks that were confirmed to pose serious threats to the safety of the testbed, and suggests a number of research challenges and opportunities for applying a similar type of formal analysis to cyber-physical security.