Vulnerabilities of Cyber-Physical Linear Control Systems to Sophisticated Attacks

The purpose of this paper is to examine fundamentals of linear control systems and consider vulnerability of the main cyber physical control system features and concepts under malicious attacks, first of all, stability, controllability, and observability, design of feedback loops, design and placement of sensors and controllers. The detailed study is limited to the most important vulnerability issues in time-invariant, unconstrained, deterministic, linear physical systems. Several interesting and motivations examples are provided. We outline also some basic vulnerability studies for time-invariant nonlinear systems.