Aging Attacks against Electro-Mechanical Actuators from Control Signal Manipulation

The progress made in terms of controller technologies with the introduction of remotely-accessibility capacity in the digital controllers has opened the door to new cybersecurity threats on the Industrial Control Systems (ICSs). Among them, some aim at damaging the ICS's physical system. In this paper, a corrupted controller emitting a non-legitimate Pulse Width Modulation control signal to an Electro-Mechanical Actuator (EMA) is considered. The attacker's capabilities for accelerating the EMA's aging by inducing Partial Discharges (PDs) are investigated. A simplified model is considered for highlighting the influence of the carrier frequency of the control signal over the amplitude and the repetition of the PDs involved in the EMA's aging.

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