A stealthy man-in-the-middle attack strategy for switched systems

Abstract

To address the security of cyber-physical systems, stealthy attacks, a class of false data injection attacks that can impact a system without being detected, have been studied in the recent decade. The existing discussions on stealthy attack design have rarely considered systems with switching structures, but recent literature shows the importance of this problem. Therefore, we are motivated to investigate a stealthy man-in-the-middle attack strategy that can be applied to switched systems. Specifically, we first investigate how to design a stealthy attack without using mode information. Then, we consider whether the attacker can infer the mode information that can be used to design a stealthy attack. By combining mode identification and stealthy attack design, a stealthy man-in-the-middle attack strategy for switched systems is proposed. In addition, the feasibility and effectiveness of the strategy are discussed, and an illustrative numerical example is given to demonstrate the proposed strategy.