Securing cyber physical systems from injection attacks by exploiting random sequences

The security of Cyber Physical Systems is a key factor since these architectures are being applied in many critical scenarios, such as power or water plants, hospitals, etc. In the state of the art, several approaches have been proposed to deal with the possible attacks that could be inferred to the Cyber Physical Systems. This contribution proposes a method for counter fighting the injection of tampered data in the communication channel. If this attack is not timely detected, it may result in severe disruption of the system or even in its complete damage. The proposed approach is based on coding the physical output of the system through permutation matrices whose scheme varies based on a randomly generated sequence. The strength of this method is in reducing the possibility of a successful injection attack while limiting the computational complexity. The experimental tests prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in detecting the performed attack while granting the real time constraints of the Cyber Physical Systems.