DARIA: Designing Actuators to Resist Arbitrary Attacks Against Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

In the past decade we have seen an active research community proposing attacks and defenses to Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Most of these attacks and defenses have been heuristic in nature, limiting the attacker to a set of predefined operations, and proposing defenses with unclear security guarantees. In this paper, we propose a generic adversary model that can capture any type of attack (our attacker is not constrained to follow specific attacks such as replay, delay, or bias) and use it to design security mechanisms with provable security guarantees. In particular, we propose a new secure design paradigm we call DARIA: Designing Actuators to Resist arbItrary Attacks. The main idea behind DARIA is the design of physical limits to actuators in order to prevent attackers from arbitrarily manipulating the system, irrespective of their point of attack (sensors or actuators) or the specific attack algorithm (bias, replay, delays, etc.). As far as we are aware, we are the first research team to propose the design of physical limits to actuators in a control loop in order to keep the system secure against attacks. We demonstrate the generality of our proposal on simulations of vehicular platooning and industrial processes.