# Adversarial Regression for Detecting Attacks in Cyber-Physical Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11022 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11022/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Resilient Machine Learning for Networked Cyber Physical Systems: A Survey for Machine Learning Security to Securing Machine Learning for CPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07244/) (2021)
- [On the Robustness of Decision-Focused Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16487/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Attacks in cyber-physical systems (CPS) which manipulate sensor readings can cause enormous physical damage if undetected. Detection of attacks on sensors is crucial to mitigate this issue. We study supervised regression as a means to detect anomalous sensor readings, where each sensor's measurement is predicted as a function of other sensors. We show that several common learning approaches in this context are still vulnerable to stealthy attacks, which carefully modify readings of compromised sensors to cause desired damage while remaining undetected. Next, we model the interaction between the CPS defender and attacker as a Stackelberg game in which the defender chooses detection thresholds, while the attacker deploys a stealthy attack in response. We present a heuristic algorithm for finding an approximately optimal threshold for the defender in this game, and show that it increases system resilience to attacks without significantly increasing the false alarm rate.