A Survey of Cyber Attacks on Cyber Physical Systems: Recent Advances and Challenges

TLDR

Cyber‑physical systems integrate sensing, computation, control, and networking into physical processes, are essential to modern industry, and face growing security threats from cyber attacks that can cause significant damage. This survey reviews state‑of‑the‑art research on cyber attacks targeting cyber‑physical systems. The authors examine time‑driven and event‑driven system models and analyze attacks on availability, integrity, and confidentiality, detailing attacker and defender strategies across different models. The survey highlights several challenges and open research issues to guide future work in securing cyber‑physical systems.

Abstract

A cyber physical system (CPS) is a complex system that integrates sensing, computation, control and networking into physical processes and objects over Internet. It plays a key role in modern industry since it connects physical and cyber worlds. In order to meet ever-changing industrial requirements, its structures and functions are constantly improved. Meanwhile, new security issues have arisen. A ubiquitous problem is the fact that cyber attacks can cause significant damage to industrial systems, and thus has gained increasing attention from researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a survey of state-of-the-art results of cyber attacks on cyber physical systems. First, as typical system models are employed to study these systems, time-driven and event-driven systems are reviewed. Then, recent advances on three types of attacks, i.e., those on availability, integrity, and confidentiality are discussed. In particular, the detailed studies on availability and integrity attacks are introduced from the perspective of attackers and defenders. Namely, both attack and defense strategies are discussed based on different system models. Some challenges and open issues are indicated to guide future research and inspire the further exploration of this increasingly important area.