The is the window between when a sensor reads a value (t=0), when the controller computes an action (t=0 + δ), and when the actuator moves (t=0 + δ + ε). An attacker does not need to falsify a sensor reading if they can simply delay it by 50ms.
The chip performs high-speed progress detection of charging/discharging voltage and current for each individual cell.
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.
While traditional cybersecurity (CSC5113A) worries about data confidentiality and integrity, and network security (CSC5113B) focuses on packet transmission, 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 .
