Power attack: An imminent security threat in real-time system for detecting missing rail blocks in developing countries

Abstract Exploration of potential security threats and vulnerabilities of a real-time system specifically designed for detecting missing rail blocks in the context of developing countries is yet to be explored. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new threat called power attack through exploiting vulnerability pertinent to the energy sources of the real-time system for detecting missing rail blocks. Consequently, we present both theoretical and mathematical modeling of attack model to effectively launch the power attack. In addition, we perform comparison of our proposed power attack with other attacks such as man-in-the-middle attack and jamming attack. Furthermore, we perform extensive experimentation using both ns-2 simulator and real deployment to investigate the applicability and the effectiveness of our exposed attack model for the real-time system for detecting missing rail blocks.