Butterfly Attack: Adversarial Manipulation of Temporal Properties of Cyber-Physical Systems

Increasing internet connectivity poses an existential threat for cyber-physical systems. Securing these safety-critical systems becomes an important challenge. Cyber-physical systems often comprise several control applications that are implemented on shared platforms where both high and low criticality tasks execute together (to reduce cost). Such resource sharing may lead to complex timing behaviors and, in turn, counter-intuitive timing anomalies that can be exploited by adversaries to destabilize a critical control system, resulting in irreversible consequences. We introduce the butterfly attack, a new attack scenario against cyber-physical systems that carefully exploits the sensitivity of control applications with respect to the implementation on the underlying execution platforms. We illustrate the possibility of such attacks using two case-studies from the automotive and avionic domains.