On detectability of cyber-attacks for large-scale interconnected systems

Abstract The paper deals with the key problem of detecting cyber-attacks in the context of large-scale systems (LSS). As these systems grow in size and complexity, cyber-attacks may target limited parts of the LSS, leading to tackling the problem in a decentralized way. We analyze the properties of distributed detection schemes under both local and interconnection attacks, and show that they are vulnerable to attacks that exploit the structure of the interconnections between subsystems. We also provide conditions and strategies that may be adopted to make the distributed control architecture regulating the LSS robust to this class of cyber-attacks.