Cybersecurity Landscape on Remote State Estimation: A Comprehensive Review

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have emerged as an essential area of research in the last decade, providing a new paradigm for the integration of computational and physical units in modern control systems. Remote state estimation (RSE) is an indispensable functional module of CPSs. Recently, it has been demonstrated that malicious agents can manipulate data packets transmitted through unreliable channels of RSE, leading to severe estimation performance degradation. This paper aims to present an overview of recent advances in cyber-attacks and defensive countermeasures, with a specific focus on integrity attacks against RSE. Firstly, two representative frameworks for the synthesis of optimal deception attacks with various performance metrics and stealthiness constraints are discussed, which provide a deeper insight into the vulnerabilities of RSE. Secondly, a detailed review of typical attack detection and resilient estimation algorithms is included, illustrating the latest defensive measures safeguarding RSE from adversaries. Thirdly, some prevalent attacks impairing the confidentiality and data availability of RSE are examined from both attackers’ and defenders’ perspectives. Finally, several challenges and open problems are presented to inspire further exploration and future research in this field.