Detecting integrity attacks on control systems using robust physical watermarking

Ensuring the security of control systems against integrity attacks is a major challenge. Due to the events of Stuxnet, replay attacks in particular have been considered by the research community. Replaying previous measurements of a system in steady state allows an adversary to generate statistically correct virtual outputs which can bypass traditional detectors. The adversary can then inject destabilizing inputs to cause damage to the plant. The method of injecting secret noisy control inputs, or physical watermarking, has recently been proposed to detect replay attacks. However, the proposed watermarking design methods assume that the adversary does not use his potential access to real time communication channels to create stealthy virtual outputs to send to the defender. In this paper, we formulate an attack model for an adversary who uses knowledge of the system as well as access to a subset of real time control inputs and sensor outputs to construct stealthy virtual outputs. A robust physical watermark and detector to counter such an adversary is proposed.