2018 IJCAI IJCAI 2018

Adversarial Regression for Detecting Attacks in Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Attacks in cyber-physical systems (CPS) which manipulate sensor readings can cause enormous physical damage if undetected. Detection of attacks on sensors is crucial to mitigate this issue. We study supervised regression as a means to detect anomalous sensor readings, where each sensor's measurement is predicted as a function of other sensors. We show that several common learning approaches in this context are still vulnerable to stealthy attacks, which carefully modify readings of compromised sensors to cause desired damage while remaining undetected. Next, we model the interaction between the CPS defender and attacker as a Stackelberg game in which the defender chooses detection thresholds, while the attacker deploys a stealthy attack in response. We present a heuristic algorithm for finding an approximately optimal threshold for the defender in this game, and show that it increases system resilience to attacks without significantly increasing the false alarm rate.

🌉 Interdisciplinary Bridge — Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
🧭 Keyword Pioneer — stealthy attack
🐝 Cross-Pollinator — Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Computer Vision, Data Science & Analytics, Deep Learning, Healthcare & Medicine, Machine Learning, Mathematics & Optimization, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning, Speech & Audio
📈 Trend Setter — Regression