MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W3182317422 · doi:10.1049/cps2.12020

Covert channels in stochastic cyber‐physical systems

2021· article· en· W3182317422 on OpenAlexafffund
Walter Lúcia, Amr Youssef

Bibliographic record

VenueIET Cyber-Physical Systems Theory & Applications · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicSmart Grid Security and Resilience
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsComputer scienceCovert channelExploitAcknowledgementChannel (broadcasting)Cyber-physical systemComputer securityDecoding methodsComputer networkCovertAlgorithm

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract A covert channel is a communication channel that is not intended to exist, and that can be used to transfer information in a manner that violates the system security policy. Attackers can abuse such channels to exfiltrate sensitive information from cyber‐physical systems (CPSs), for example to leak the confidential or proprietary parameters in a control system. Furthermore, attacks against CPSs can exploit the leaked information about the implementation of the control system, for example to determine optimal false data injection attack values that degrade the system performance while remaining undetected. In this study, a control theoretic approach for establishing covert channels in stochastic CPSs is presented. In particular, a scenario is considered where an attacker is able to inject malware into the networked controller and arbitrarily alter the control logic. By exploiting such capability, an attacker can establish an illegitimate communication channel, for example to transmit sensitive plant parameters, between the networked controller and an eavesdropper intercepting the sensor measurements. The authors show that such a channel can be established by exploiting the closed‐loop system operations, a decoding mechanism based on an unknown input observer, and an error‐correcting coding scheme that exploits the control loop to obtain an implicit acknowledgement. A simple proof of concept implementation of the covert channel is presented, and its performance is evaluated by resorting to a numerical example. Finally, some defences and countermeasures are proposed against the proposed covert channel.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.002
Threshold uncertainty score0.008

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.226
Teacher spread0.219 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2021
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueIET Cyber-Physical Systems Theory & ApplicationsSame topicSmart Grid Security and ResilienceFrench-language works237,207