Optimal Denial-of-Service Attack Scheduling in Cyber-Physical Systems∗

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 paper, 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. Index Terms State estimation, DoS attack, energy constraint.