Csc5113c May 2026

CSC5113C – Advanced Topics in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Security Author: [Your Name] Date: April 14, 2026 Abstract While traditional cybersecurity (CSC5113A) worries about data confidentiality and integrity, and network security (CSC5113B) focuses on packet transmission, CSC5113C occupies a far more dangerous intersection: the marriage of physics, real-time constraints, and adversarial control. This paper argues that the core difficulty of CPS security is not the complexity of the code, but the tyranny of timing . We introduce the concept of the “Synchronization Gap”—the mismatch between digital computation speed and physical process speed—as the primary attack surface. Using three case studies (a smart grid relay, an autonomous emergency braking system, and a robotic surgical arm), we demonstrate that the most devastating attacks do not crash the system; they merely convince it that time has slowed down . 1. Introduction: The Silent Shift CSC5113A taught us to build firewalls. CSC5113B taught us to encrypt tunnels. CSC5113C teaches us a humbling lesson: A dam doesn’t care about your SSL certificate.

Attack: The adversary does not trigger a false fault. Instead, they inject a low-rate denial-of-service (LoRDOS) on the relay’s GPS timing source. The relay’s clock drifts by only 10ms. csc5113c

You cannot simultaneously know the exact physical state of a CPS and respond to it securely, because the act of securing (encryption, authentication, attestation) adds unbounded latency. 3. Attack Taxonomy: Three Ways to Break the Clock Traditional attacks (buffer overflow, SQLi) are trivial in comparison to these three classes unique to CSC5113C: CSC5113C – Advanced Topics in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)

| Attack Class | Mechanism | Physical Outcome | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | Flood the control loop with low-priority network traffic, causing control tasks to miss deadlines. | Rotor overspeed, chemical overflow. | | Time-Dilation Spoof | Replay old sensor data with manipulated timestamps, stretching the perceived duration of an event. | ABS system brakes too early/late. | | Resonance Injection | Inject control signals at the natural frequency of a physical process (e.g., bridge, power line). | Cascading failure via harmonic excitation. | 4. Case Study: The "Tired Relay" Attack (Smart Grid) Scenario: A protection relay on a 138kV transmission line must trip within 4 cycles (66ms) of detecting a fault. Using three case studies (a smart grid relay,