Graph-Based Simulation for Cyber-Physical Attacks on Smart Buildings

Abstract

As buildings evolve toward the envisioned smart building paradigm, smart buildings’ cybersecurity issues, and physical security issues are mingling. Although research studies have been conducted to detect and prevent physical (or cyber) intrusions to smart building systems (SBS), it is still unknown (1) how one type of intrusion facilitates the other and (2) how such synergic attacks compromise the security protection of whole systems. To investigate both research questions, the authors propose a graph-based testbed to simulate cyber-physical attacks on smart buildings. The testbed models both cyber and physical accesses of a smart building in an integrated graph and simulates diverse cyber-physical attacks to assess their synergic impacts on the building and its systems. In this paper, the authors present the testbed design and the developed prototype, SHSim. An experiment is conducted to simulate attacks on multiple smart home designs and to demonstrate the functions and feasibility of the proposed simulation system.

Keywords

Cyber-Physical Attacks; Cybersecurity; Smart Buildings; Simulation; Graph Theory.

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