Decision tree-based detection of denial of service and command injection attacks on robotic vehicles

Mobile cyber-physical systems, such as automobiles, drones and robotic vehicles, are gradually becoming attractive targets for cyber attacks. This is a challenge because intrusion detection systems built for conventional computer systems tend to be unsuitable. They can be too demanding for resource-restricted cyber-physical systems or too inaccurate due to the lack of real-world data on actual attack behaviours. Here, we focus on the security of a small remote-controlled robotic vehicle. Having observed that certain types of cyber attacks against it exhibit physical impact, we have developed an intrusion detection system that takes into account not only cyber input features, such as network traffic and disk data, but also physical input features, such as speed, physical jittering and power consumption. As the system is resource-restricted, we have opted for a decision tree-based approach for generating simple detection rules, which we evaluate against denial of service and command injection attacks. We observe that the addition of physical input features can markedly reduce the false positive rate and increase the overall accuracy of the detection.