English

A Formal Approach to Cyber-Physical Attacks

Cryptography and Security 2017-04-24 v2

Abstract

We apply formal methods to lay and streamline theoretical foundations to reason about Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and cyber-physical attacks. We focus on %a formal treatment of both integrity and DoS attacks to sensors and actuators of CPSs, and on the timing aspects of these attacks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we define a hybrid process calculus to model both CPSs and cyber-physical attacks; (2) we define a threat model of cyber-physical attacks and provide the means to assess attack tolerance/vulnerability with respect to a given attack; (3) we formalise how to estimate the impact of a successful attack on a CPS and investigate possible quantifications of the success chances of an attack. We illustrate definitions and results by means of a non-trivial engineering application.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.01377,
  title  = {A Formal Approach to Cyber-Physical Attacks},
  author = {Ruggero Lanotte and Massimo Merro and Riccardo Muradore and Luca Viganò},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.01377},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:42:10.307Z