• cyber-physical attacks
• IP-based computer networks
• security

Cyber-physical systems and computer networks are exposed to a number of cyber-physical attacks, that can have a severe impact against performance, and service integrity and availability. Although it is important to assure an adequate level of security, it is practically unfeasible to address all possible attacks at the maximum possible extent, due to technical or economic constraints. Hence, even before the system/network deployment takes place, it is vital to understand the impact of security attacks, in order to rank them according to their severity, and address them more effectively and efficiently. We have developed a simulative approach that allows the user to quantitatively evaluate the impact of cyber-physical attacks. Rather than implementing and actually performing the considered attacks, our approach simply reproduces their final effects on the network and application. The user describes attacks through a high-level specification language, and does not need to implement or customize any component of the referred simulative platform. On the basis of this approach, we have implemented an attack simulator prototype, built on top of the INET framework (based on the OMNeT++ platform). The simulator is mainly intended for IP-based conventional computer networks. To fix ideas and show its capabilities, we consider a realistic application scenarios, and evaluate the effects of cyber-physical attacks against the considered network and application.