Data‐based optimal Denial‐of‐Service attack scheduling against robust control based on Q‐learning

Abstract

SummaryAttack optimization is an important issue in securing cyber‐physical systems. This paper investigates how an attacker should schedule its denial‐of‐service attacks to degrade the robust performance of a closed‐loop system. The measurements of system states are transmitted to a remote controller over a multichannel network. With limited resources, the attacker only has the capacity to jam sparse channels and to decide which channels should be attacked. Under an framework, a data‐based optimal attack strategy that uses Q‐learning is proposed to maximize the effect on the closed‐loop system. The Q‐learning algorithm can adaptively learn the optimal attack using data sniffed over the wireless network without requiring a priori knowledge of system parameters. Simulation results sustain the performance of the proposed attack scenario.