On Covert Data Falsification Attacks on Distributed Detection Systems

In distributed detection systems, nodes make one bit decisions regarding the presence of a phenomenon and collaboratively make a global decision at the fusion center (FC). The performance of such systems strongly depends on the reliability of the nodes in the network. The robustness of distributed detection systems against attacks is of utmost importance for the functioning of distributed detection systems. The distributed nature of such systems makes them quite vulnerable to different types of attacks. In this paper, we introduce the problem of intelligent data falsification attacks on distributed detection systems. First, we propose a scheme to detect data falsification attacks and analytically characterize its performance. Next, we obtain the optimal attacking strategy from the point of view of a smart adversary to disguise itself from the proposed detection scheme while accomplishing its attack.