Controller-jammer game models of Denial of Service in control systems operating over packet-dropping links
For control systems operating over packet-dropping links, this work provides a game-theoretic framework to analyze adversarial jamming, but the results are preliminary and incremental.
The paper models Denial of Service attacks on networked control systems as zero-sum games between a controller and a strategic jammer, showing that even in one-step games a saddle-point equilibrium exists where the jammer's optimal policy involves randomization. Conditions for equilibrium are derived and extended to multi-stage games with greedy jamming strategies.
The paper introduces a class of zero-sum games between the adversary and controller as a scenario for a `denial of service' in a networked control system. The communication link is modeled as a set of transmission regimes controlled by a strategic jammer whose intention is to wage an attack on the plant by choosing a most damaging regime-switching strategy. We demonstrate that even in the one-step case, the introduced games admit a saddle-point equilibrium, at which the jammer's optimal policy is to randomize in a region of the plant's state space, thus requiring the controller to undertake a nontrivial response which is different from what one would expect in a standard stochastic control problem over a packet dropping link. The paper derives conditions for the introduced games to have such a saddle-point equilibrium. Furthermore, we show that in more general multi-stage games, these conditions provide `greedy' jamming strategies for the adversary.