Optimizing DoS attack energy with imperfect acknowledgments and energy harvesting constraints in cyber-physical systems

Abstract This article studies denial-of-service (DoS) attack energy allocation problem for remote state estimation in cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The attacker having the ability to harvest energy sabotages packet transmission from the sensor to the remote state estimator, and it can receive information about whether the packet has arrived at the destination through an erroneous feedback channel. Because of the uncertainty of energy collection and the limitation of battery storage, the adversary needs to tailor jamming power to maximize finite and infinite horizon average estimation error covariance on the remote estimator side, respectively. The energy allocation problem of imperfect feedback is transformed into Markov decision process (MDP) of perfect acknowledgments via the iteration of state information. Then we get the optimal DoS attack energy allocation strategy with imperfect acknowledgments and energy harvesting constraints. A myopic strategy for energy allocation and some structural results are also presented. Finally, the theoretical results are verified via a numerical example.