Stealthy Computational Delay Attacks on Control Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are integral to critical infrastructure, but their interconnected nature exposes them to sophisticated cyber threats. Traditional security mechanisms primarily focus on detecting direct manipulations of control signals or sensor data, leaving them vulnerable to more subtle attack vectors. This paper introduces a novel optimisation framework for modelling and executing stealthy computational delay attacks---an attack class that subtly interferes with controller execution timing to degrade system performance while remaining undetected. Unlike conventional denial-of-service attacks, these stealthy attacks introduce delays selectively, ensuring that the controller fails to compute control signals in time without triggering standard anomaly detection mechanisms.