Backdoor Attacks on Fault Detection and Localization in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) integrate sensing, communication, computation, and control to support critical infrastructure, including smart grids, industrial automation, and control systems. In the electrical utility domain, various controllers are used in CPS to ensure the system detects and recovers from faults, such as voltage fluctuations, and to perform load balancing in distribution systems. Machine learning- and deep learning-based fault detection and localization frameworks have recently gained significant attention in CPS for their ability to identify anomalies and operational failures in real time. However, these intelligent models are vulnerable to adversarial machine learning attacks, particularly backdoor attacks. In a backdoor attack, an adversary injects malicious patterns into the training data so that the model behaves normally most of the time but produces attacker-controlled outputs when triggered by specific patterns. This paper investigates the threat of backdoor attacks against fault detection and localization mechanisms in recent ML pipelines used in modern CPS systems. We define these threats and explore how they can be realized by designing triggers and evaluating their success in the CPS domain. Our experiments show the attack is successful even with 10% of poisoning.