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A Formal Approach to Physics-based Attacks in Cyber-physical Systems

Published: 05 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We apply formal methods to lay and streamline theoretical foundations to reason about Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and physics-based attacks, i.e., attacks targeting physical devices. We focus on a formal treatment of both integrity and denial of service attacks to sensors and actuators of CPSs, and on the timing aspects of these attacks. Our contributions are fourfold. (1) We define a hybrid process calculus to model both CPSs and physics-based attacks. (2) We formalise a threat model that specifies MITM attacks that can manipulate sensor readings or control commands to drive a CPS into an undesired state; we group these attacks into classes and provide the means to assess attack tolerance/vulnerability with respect to a given class of attacks, based on a proper notion of most powerful physics-based attack. (3) We formalise how to estimate the impact of a successful attack on a CPS and investigate possible quantifications of the success chances of an attack. (4) We illustrate our definitions and results by formalising a non-trivial running example in UPPAAL SMC, the statistical extension of the UPPAAL model checker; we use UPPAAL SMC as an automatic tool for carrying out a static security analysis of our running example in isolation and when exposed to three different physics-based attacks with different impacts.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security  Volume 23, Issue 1
February 2020
209 pages
ISSN:2471-2566
EISSN:2471-2574
DOI:10.1145/3382042
Issue’s Table of Contents
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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Publication History

Published: 05 February 2020
Accepted: 01 November 2019
Revised: 01 August 2019
Received: 01 February 2019
Published in TOPS Volume 23, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Cyber-physical system security
  2. attack impact
  3. attack tolerance/<?brk?>vulnerability
  4. formal security analysis
  5. process calculi

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  • Refereed

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  • Universities and Research (MIUR)
  • Italian Ministry of Education

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