Domain-Specific Security Approaches for Cyber-Physical Systems

In recent years, attacks have emerged in various cyber-physical systems (CPS), causing power outages, disrupting water treatment processes, and so on. These attacks, which are often referred to as advanced persistent threats (APT), reveal a daunting fact. Adversaries are no longer amateurs that randomly probe and compromise many computing devices; they are equipped with advanced intelligence of domain-specific knowledge of the target system and act to achieve a specific goal, e.g., disrupting physical processes. Like a well-trained sniper, adversaries can target a small number of certain devices and can exploit legitimate control operations or well-crafted measurements to inflict physical damage without introducing system- or network-level anomalies. This chapter will present our belief that can effectively address those advanced threats, i.e., integrating domain-specific knowledge of a target system (with the main focus on smart power grids) into general-purpose security solutions. This approach will allow us to reveal adversaries’ malicious intentions and preemptively prevent damage from happening.