What is it about?
This paper describes a new variant of cyberattack on critical infrastructure, which takes into account the aperiodic nature at which data is sent over communication channels. By utilizing tools from geometric control, we describe how an adversary can construct such an attack, but also propose two countermeasures to prevent these attacks from achieving their goal.
Featured Image
Photo by Nick Romanov on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The study of the effect of aperiodic communication on the ability to construct attacks is important, as aperiodic sampling grows in popularity. Therefore, analyzing the extent to which the former enables attacks or can be used as a countermeasure is important research. Interestingly, we show that the key idea behind this new cyberattack is the ability of the adversary to (correctly) predict the next sampling instant.
Perspectives
I hope this article will spark curiosity in its readers and help raise awareness for cybersecurity issues in vital control systems. I think creativity is one of the greatest assets of a researcher, and as such, coming up with new attack variants (and, hopefully, countermeasures) can help progress the general understanding of resilience and vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure.
Bart Wolleswinkel
Technische Universiteit Delft
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Switched Zero Dynamics Attacks on Sampled-Data Systems with Non-uniform Sampling: Vulnerability and Countermeasures, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, July 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3746643.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
