Resilient Control Strategies for Cyber-Physical Systems Under Denial-of-Service Attacks

Resilient control strategies for cyber-physical systems under denial-of-service attacks centre on ensuring stability, performance and safety when network communications are intermittently or maliciously disrupted. Such systems integrate physical processes with computational control loops, whose feedback channels may be jammed, experience packet dropouts or suffer time-varying delays. Current work spans the development of sophisticated attack models—ranging from deterministic constraint-based and game-theoretic formulations to probabilistic and tail-probability approaches—together with robust controller designs. Key techniques include switching or multi-mode control laws that adapt to attack conditions, event-triggered and predictive control schemes that conserve bandwidth and compensate for lost data, and observer-based methods that reconstruct system states despite interruptions. Stability and performance guarantees are typically derived via Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals and linear matrix inequalities, allowing explicit characterisations of allowable attack durations, data-update rates and delay bounds. Practical realisations have been demonstrated in smart grids, multi-agent consensus networks, industrial automation and remote vehicle control. These advances underscore the global significance of resilient control in critical infrastructure, and lay the groundwork for integrating edge computing, mixed-criticality management and autonomous recovery mechanisms into future interconnected systems.

Research from Nature Portfolio

No recent Nature Portfolio content available.

Resilient Control Strategies for Cyber-Physical Systems Under Denial-of-Service Attacks publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in resilient control strategies for cyber-physical systems under denial-of-service attacks across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack: Deliberate blocking or jamming of network packets to interrupt or degrade communication in control loops.

Cyber-Physical System (CPS): Integrated platform of computational elements and physical processes connected via communication networks.

Switching System: Control architecture that switches among multiple subsystems or protocols according to network or attack conditions.

Event-Triggered Control: Transmission strategy that updates control signals only when a specified state or error condition is met.

Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI): Convex constraint involving matrices, widely used for synthesising controllers and ensuring system stability.

Lyapunov-Krasovskii Functional: Extension of Lyapunov methods to systems with time delays, used to establish stability under intermittent feedback.

References

1. An Overview on Denial-of-Service Attacks in Control Systems: Attack Models and Security Analyses. Entropy (2019).
2. Dynamic Output Feedback Control of Cyber-Physical Systems Under DoS Attacks. IEEE Access (2019).
3. Observer-Based Event-Triggered Predictive Control for Networked Control Systems under DoS Attacks. Sensors (2020).