Optimal Denial-of-Service Attack Scheduling With Energy Constraint

TLDR

Security of Cyber‑Physical Systems has attracted growing attention, yet most studies focus on system performance under predefined attack patterns. This note investigates how an attacker should schedule DoS attacks to degrade system performance. The authors model a sensor transmitting data over a wireless channel to a remote estimator, with an energy‑constrained attacker deciding when to jam, and derive optimal attack schedules that maximize expected average estimation error, including scenarios with an intrusion detection system and with sensor energy limits. Numerical simulations confirm that the proposed optimal attack schedules effectively increase estimation error.

Abstract

Security of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has gained increasing attention in recent years. Most existing works mainly investigate the system performance given some attacking patterns. In this technical note, we investigate how an attacker should schedule its Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to degrade the system performance. Specifically, we consider the scenario where a sensor sends its data to a remote estimator through a wireless channel, while an energy-constrained attacker decides whether to jam the channel at each sampling time. We construct optimal attack schedules to maximize the expected average estimation error at the remote estimator. We also provide the optimal attack schedules when a special intrusion detection system (IDS) at the estimator is given. We further discuss the optimal attack schedules when the sensor has energy constraint. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimal attack schedules.