Abstract
In this paper, a failure model of Cyber-Physical systems and an attack model are proposed. We divide the attacks into three kinds: simultaneous attack, sequential attack and composite attack. Through numerical simulations, we find that: (1) the sequential attack may bring more damage in single physical systems; (2) the coupling process of cyber system and physical systems makes it possible that sequential attack causes more damage than simultaneous attacks when the attackers only attack the cyber system; (3) with some target sets, composite attack leads to more failures than both simultaneous attack and sequential attack. The above results suggest that defenders should take all the three kinds of attacks into account when they select the critical nodes.
Highlights
Physical systems cover the majority of Critical Infrastructures (CIs), which are the cornerstone of social prosperity and development
This section is divided into three parts: first, we check whether the sequential attack can cause more damage than simultaneous attack in a load-induced network; whether the sequential attack can bring more damage than a simultaneous attack in an interdependent Cyber-Physical network is evaluated; we find new vulnerability in some attack sequences, which are neither sequential attack nor simultaneous attack
We would mainly focus on two questions: (i) in the Cyber-Physical system, whether the target sets exist with whom sequential attack would cause more damage; and (ii) if the target sets exist, are they one-to-one corresponding to the single physical subnetwork? According to the model we propose in Section 2, we design the following simulations
Summary
Physical systems cover the majority of Critical Infrastructures (CIs), which are the cornerstone of social prosperity and development. There are researchers trying to build a universal model to describe the robustness of physical systems but not limited to the power grid, and a complex network model is used [6,7,8]. It is difficult for both IT people and people from physical systems to understand the risk For the former, they know little about the physical process and for the latter, they are not skilled in cyber security [18]. The existing model mainly applies to the power grid [19,20,21], and the universal model such as interdependent networks [22,23] can not grasp the characteristics of either cyber systems or physical systems. There is little research about sequential attack on interdependent Cyber-Physical networks, which should be further studied. At the end of the paper, the discussions and conclusions are given
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