Supervisor Obfuscation Against Actuator Enablement Attack

• Published in: 2019 18th European Control Conference (ECC) pp. 1760 - 1765
• Main Authors: Zhu, Yuting, Lin, Liyong, Su, Rong
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: EUCA 01.06.2019
• Subjects: actuator attack; Actuators; Automata; Closed loop systems; Controllability; Cyber-physical systems; Degradation; Discrete-event systems; Europe; Observability; Supervisory control
• DOI: 10.23919/ECC.2019.8795844

In this paper, we propose and address the problem of supervisor obfuscation against actuator enablement attack, in a common setting where the actuator attacker can eavesdrop the control commands issued by the supervisor. We propose a method to obfuscate an (insecure) supervisor to make it resilient against actuator enablement attack in such a way that the behavior of the original closed-loop system is preserved. An additional feature of the obfuscated supervisor, if it exists, is that it has exactly the minimum number of states among the set of all the resilient and behavior-preserving supervisors. Our approach involves a simple combination of two basic ideas: 1) a formulation of the problem of computing behavior-preserving supervisors as the problem of computing separating finite state automata under controllability and observability constraints, which can be tackled by using SAT solvers, and 2) the use of a recently proposed technique for the verification of attackability in our setting, with a normality assumption imposed on both the actuator attackers and supervisors.