Characterize poisoning-flag behavior under genuine equipment degradation

Characterize whether the BALLAST poisoning-detection rules reliably distinguish gradual equipment degradation from poisoning when the physical plant, rather than only the Digital Twin, is subjected to actuator degradation.

Background

The degradation experiment perturbs actuator parameters in the Digital Twin while leaving the simulator nominal, thereby testing the safety shield under model mismatch. It does not test the independent residual monitor under actual plant degradation, because the residual monitor uses nominal actuator rates and does not consult the Twin.

The paper therefore leaves unresolved whether the poisoning flag would incorrectly identify genuine gradual equipment wear as an attack, or whether it would detect the resulting disagreement appropriately.

References

Exercising the residual requires perturbing the simulator instead, so that plant and monitor disagree; we have not run that complement, and the behaviour of the poisoning flag under genuine equipment degradation is accordingly untested.

— BALLAST: Physics-Aware Moving Target Defense for Industrial Control Systems Using a Digital Twin Safety Oracle  (2610.18311 - Mogollon-Gutierrez et al., 13 Oct 2026) in Section 5.6.1, subsection “Sensitivity to equipment degradation”