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Limitations on observability of effects in cyber-physical systems

Published: 01 April 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Increased interconnectivity of Cyber-Physical Systems, by design or otherwise, increases the cyber attack surface and attack vectors. Observing the effects of these attacks is helpful in detecting them. In this paper, we show that many attacks on such systems result in a control loop effect we term Process Model Inconsistency (PMI). Our formal approach elucidates the relationships among incompleteness, incorrectness, safety, and inconsistency of process models. We show that incomplete process models lead to inconsistency. Surprisingly, inconsistency may arise even in complete and correct models. We illustrate our approach through an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) example, and describe the practical implications of the theoretical results.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
HotSoS '19: Proceedings of the 6th Annual Symposium on Hot Topics in the Science of Security
April 2019
149 pages
ISBN:9781450371476
DOI:10.1145/3314058
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • National Security Agency: National Security Agency

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2019

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Author Tags

  1. attack detection
  2. cyber attacks
  3. cyber-physical systems
  4. dynamic behavior modeling
  5. embedded systems

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HotSoS
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  • National Security Agency
HotSoS: Hot Topics in the Science of Security Symposium
April 1 - 3, 2019
Tennessee, Nashville, USA

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