Title
Hypergames and Cyber-Physical Security for Control Systems
Abstract
The identification of the Stuxnet worm in 2010 provided a highly publicized example of a cyber attack that physically damaged an industrial control system. This raised public awareness about the possibility of similar attacks against other industrial targets—including critical infrastructure. In this article, we use hypergames to analyze how strategic perturbations of sensor readings and calibrated parameters can be used to manipulate a system that employs optimal control. Hypergames form an extension of game theory that enables us to model strategic interactions where the players may have significantly different perceptions of the game(s) they are playing. Past work with hypergames has focused on relatively simple interactions consisting of a small set of discrete choices for each player. Here, we apply single-stage hypergames to larger systems with continuous variables. We find that manipulating constraints can be a more effective attacker strategy than manipulating objective function parameters. Moreover, the attacker need not change the underlying system to carry out a successful attack—it may be sufficient to deceive the defender controlling the system. It is possible to scale our approach up to even larger systems, but this will depend on the characteristics of the system in question, and we identify several characteristics that will make those systems amenable to hypergame analysis.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3384676
ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Cyber-physical security,advanced persistent threats,game theory,optimal control
Mathematical optimization,Optimal control,Cyber-attack,Computer security,Critical infrastructure,Industrial control system,Cyber-physical system,Game theory,Stuxnet,Control system,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
4
4
2378-962X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
6
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Craig Bakker121.51
Arnab Bhattacharya211.37
Samrat Chatterjee321.72
Draguna L. Vrabie421.08