Optimal cooperative multiple-attackers scheduling against remote state estimation of cyber-physical systems

Abstract In this paper, we consider multiple-attackers schedule problem against remote state estimation in cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Compared with the existing results in which only one type of attacker is considered, we aim to address the case that Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacker and linear deception attacker exist in CPSs simultaneously. With limited resource, the two attackers have to, cooperatively, decide whether to launch or not and which type of attack to inject at each time and further determine optimal schedule over a finite time horizon to degrade the performance of system at the largest. First of all, the evolutions of remotely estimated state and error covariance under an attack schedule are derived. Next, we regard average error and terminal error as performance indexes of systems, respectively, and analyze their intrinsic properties to find out the corresponding optimal attack scheduling schemes. Finally, an example is given to show the effectiveness of our theoretical results.