A survey of cyber-physical attacks and detection methods in smart water distribution systems

Abstract

Modern technologies empower water distribution systems (WDS) for better services in the processes of water supply, storage, distribution, and recycling. They improve real-time monitoring, automating, and managing. However, the limitations of these technologies introduce cyber-physical attacks to the WDS. The main goals of cyber-physical attacks include disrupting normal operations and tampering the critical data, which have negative impacts on the WDS. Therefore, it is vital to develop and implement solutions to increase the security of the WDS by detecting and mitigating cyber-physical attacks. Since security for WDS is relatively new, there are no surveys on this topic despite its vital importance. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey for the common cyber-physical attacks and common detection mechanisms for the WDS. We compare the attacks and detection methods with emphasis on ideas, methods, evaluation results, advantages, limitations, etc. We further provide a future research direction. We realize that there are still not many research attempts in this area and we hope that this work can trigger more research activities related to the WDS.