Experimental Evaluation of Stealthy Attack Detection in a Robot

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) approach for detecting cyber attacks on Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). The Amigobot robot was used as the CPS in this study. Three types of stealthy attacks were considered, namely, surge, bias, and geometric. While a similar study has been reported earlier using a simulated chemical plant, the objective of the study reported here was to replicate the previous study in a realistic CPS environment and investigate whether the detection method performs differently. Cyber attacks were implemented on the Amigobot through its wireless control mechanism by changing the readings obtained from one of its sonar sensors. In addition, the investigation focused on understanding the impact of attack timing and duration on (a) detection effectiveness of the CUSUM method and (b) system safety. Analysis of experimental data indicates differences between results reported in the previous simulation-based study and those reported here.