A Robust Covert Attack Strategy for a Class of Uncertain Cyber-Physical Systems

The widespread use of the network in control systems significantly increases the risk of cyber attacks. As a kind of cyber attacks, covert attack has attracted much attention in recent years. In a covert attack, the adversary can control the plant arbitrarily through the communication network without being detected by the monitoring system. This article is concerned with a new covert attack strategy called the robust covert attack on the cyber-physical systems. Different from the standard covert attack, the adversary does not need to have complete knowledge of the plant model in the proposed robust covert attack. The robust covert attack is made stealthy in the presence of model uncertainty by using the sliding mode control and time-delayed estimation technique. The stealthiness of the robust covert attack is illustrated by an example.