Stealthy switching attacks on sensors against state estimation in cyber-physical systems

This article focuses on designing sensor attacks to deteriorate the state estimation in cyber-physical systems. The scenario that the malicious attack signals can be injected into different but limited number of sensor communication channels is considered. The state estimation error variations and innovation variations are adopted to measure attack performance and attack stealthiness, respectively. A switching attack strategy is proposed, under which the estimation error variations are driven to the predesigned target value and the norm of innovation variations remains at a small level. The switching attack design problem is formulated as a discrete switched optimal control problem which can be solved by dynamic programming, while the computational burden is heavy. To overcome this difficulty, by using pruning technique to remove the redundant matrices generated in dynamic programming, the quadratic optimization problem becomes numerically tractable. In this way, the suboptimal attack signal sequence and switching sequence can be acquired. Finally, a simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack strategy.