A Game-Based Framework Towards Cyber-Attacks on State Estimation in ICSs

The security issue on remote state estimation process against false data injection (FDI) attacks in Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) is considered in this paper. To be practically, it is more reasonable to assume whether or not a meter measurement could be compromised by an adversary does depend on the defense budget deployed on it by the system defender. Based on this premise, this paper focuses on designing the defense budget strategy to protect state estimation process in ICSs against FDI attacks by applying a game-based framework. With resource-constraints for both the defender and the attacker side, the decision making process of how to deploy the defending budget for defenders and how to launch attacks on the meters for an attacker are investigated. A game-based framework is formulated and it has been proved that the Nash equilibrium is existed. For practical computation convenience, an on-line updating algorithm is proposed. What’s more, the simulation of the game-based framework described in this paper is demonstrated to verify its validity and efficiency. The experimental results have shown that the game-based framework could improve performance of the decision making and estimation process and mitigate the impact of the FDI attack. This may provide a novel and feasible perspective to protect the state estimation process and improve the intrusion tolerance in ICSs.