Physics and AI-Driven Anomaly Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Organizations across various sectors are moving rapidly to digitization. Multiple applications in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) emerged from interconnectivity such as smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and smart grids, utilizing advanced capabilities of the Internet of Things (IoTs), cloud computing, and machine learning. Interconnectivity also becomes a critical component in industrial systems such as smart manufacturing, smart oil, and gas distribution grid, smart electric power grid, etc. These critical infrastructures and systems rely on industrial IoT and learning-enabled components to handle the uncertainty and variability of the environment and increase autonomy in making effective operational decisions. The prosperity and benefits of systems interconnectivity demand the fulfillment of functional requirements such as interoperability of communication and technology, efficiency and reliability, and real-time communication. Systems need to integrate with various communication technologies and standards, process and analyze shared data efficiently, ensure the integrity and accuracy of exchanged data, and execute their processes with tolerable delay. This creates new attack vectors targeting both physical and cyber components. Protection of systems interconnection and validation of communicated data against cyber and physical attacks become critical due to the consequences of disruption attacks pose to critical systems.

In this dissertation, we tackle one of the prominent attacks in the CPS space, namely the false data injection attack (FDIA). FDIA is an attack executed to maliciously influence decisions, that is CPSs operational decisions such as opening a valve, changing wind turbine configurations, charging/discharging energy storage system batteries, or coordinating autonomous vehicles driving. We focus on the development of anomaly detection techniques to protect CPSs from this emerging threat. The anomaly detection mechanisms leverage both physics of CPSs and AI to improve their detection capability as well as the CPSs' ability to mitigate the impact of FDIA on their operations.