A Formal Approach to Cyber-Physical Attacks

Ruggero Lanotte, Massimo Merro, Riccardo Muradore, Luca Vigano
2017 2017 IEEE 30th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)  
We apply formal methods to lay and streamline theoretical foundations to reason about Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and cyber-physical attacks. We focus on integrity and DoS attacks to sensors and actuators of CPSs, and on the timing aspects of these attacks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we define a hybrid process calculus to model both CPSs and cyber-physical attacks; (2) we define a threat model of cyber-physical attacks and provide the means to assess attack tolerance/vulnerability
more » ... th respect to a given attack; (3) we formalise how to estimate the impact of a successful attack on a CPS and investigate possible quantifications of the success chances of an attack. We illustrate definitions and results by means of a non-trivial engineering application.
doi:10.1109/csf.2017.12 dblp:conf/csfw/LanotteMMV17 fatcat:ae7tzr4zorfczmr57wnghpmnru