English

A Dynamic Coding Scheme to Prevent Covert Cyber-Attacks in Cyber-Physical Systems

Systems and Control 2025-12-10 v1 Systems and Control

Abstract

In this paper, we address two main problems in the context of covert cyber-attacks in cyber-physical systems (CPS). First, we aim to investigate and develop necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of disruption resources of the CPS that enable adversaries to execute covert cyber-attacks. These conditions can be utilized to identify the input and output communication channels that are needed by adversaries to execute these attacks. Second, this paper introduces and develops a dynamic coding scheme as a countermeasure against covert cyber-attacks. Under certain conditions and assuming the existence of one secure input and two secure output communication channels, the proposed dynamic coding scheme prevents adversaries from executing covert cyber-attacks. A numerical case study of a flight control system is provided to demonstrate the capabilities of our proposed and developed dynamic coding scheme.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.08134,
  title  = {A Dynamic Coding Scheme to Prevent Covert Cyber-Attacks in Cyber-Physical Systems},
  author = {Mahdi Taheri and Khashayar Khorasani and Nader Meskin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.08134},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:15:55.177Z