A Study on False Information Injection Attack on Dynamic State Estimation in Multi-Sensor Systems

Abstract

In this paper, the impact of false information injection is investigated for linear dynamic systems with multiple sensors. It is assumed that the system is unsuspecting the existence of false information and the adversary is trying to maximize the negative effect of the false information on Kalman filter's estimation performance. The false information attack under different conditions is mathematically characterized. For the adversary, many closed-form results for the optimal attack strategies that maximize Kalman filter's estimation error are theoretically derived. It is shown that by choosing the optimal correlation coefficients among the bias noises and allocating power optimally among sensors, the adversary could significantly increase Kalman filter's estimation errors. To be concrete, a target tracking system is used as an example in the paper. From the adversary's point of view, the best attack strategies are obtained under different scenarios, including a single-sensor system with both position and velocity measurements, and a multi-sensor system with position and velocity measurements. Under a constraint on the total power of the injected bias noises, the optimal solutions are solved from two perspectives: trace and determinant. Numerical results are also provided in order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack strategies.