Jamming attack in centralized state estimation

To understand the behavior of potential network invaders, this paper considers a system attack problem from the perspective of an invader. The invader intends to attack a system, where a group of sensors measure a process state and send the measurements to a remote estimator for state estimation, by launching Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to block the communication channels. As the invader has a power budget and cannot block all the channels, he needs to decide which sensors to attack so that the estimation performance can be mostly affected, which is studied in this paper. In the scenario where the sensing abilities of the sensors have a full order, an explicit solution is provided. When the order does not exist, the problem is transformed into a convex optimization problem and is solved using efficient numerical algorithms.