Attack-Resilient Supervisory Control of Discrete-Event Systems

In this work, we study the problem of supervisory control of discrete-event systems (DES) in the presence of attacks that tamper with inputs and outputs of the plant. We consider a very general system setup as we focus on both deterministic and nondeterministic plants that we model as finite state transducers (FSTs); this also covers the conventional approach to modeling DES as deterministic finite automata. Furthermore, we cover a wide class of attacks that can nondeterministically add, remove, or rewrite a sensing and/or actuation word to any word from predefined regular languages, and show how such attacks can be modeled by nondeterministic FSTs; we also present how the use of FSTs facilitates modeling realistic (and very complex) attacks, as well as provides the foundation for design of attack-resilient supervisory controllers. Specifically, we first consider the supervisory control problem for deterministic plants with attacks (i) only on their sensors, (ii) only on their actuators, and (iii) both on their sensors and actuators. For each case, we develop new conditions for controllability in the presence of attacks, as well as synthesizing algorithms to obtain FST-based description of such attack-resilient supervisors. A derived resilient controller provides a set of all safe control words that can keep the plant work desirably even in the presence of corrupted observation and/or if the control words are subjected to actuation attacks. Then, we extend the controllability theorems and the supervisor synthesizing algorithms to nondeterministic plants that satisfy a nonblocking condition. Finally, we illustrate applicability of our methodology on several examples and numerical case-studies

Synthesis of Covert Actuator Attackers for Free

In this paper, we shall formulate and address a problem of covert actuator attacker synthesis for cyber-physical systems that are modelled by discrete-event systems. We assume the actuator attacker partially observes the execution of the closed-loop system and is able to modify each control command issued by the supervisor on a specified attackable subset of controllable events. We provide straightforward but in general exponential-time reductions, due to the use of subset construction procedure, from the covert actuator attacker synthesis problems to the Ramadge-Wonham supervisor synthesis problems. It then follows that it is possible to use the many techniques and tools already developed for solving the supervisor synthesis problem to solve the covert actuator attacker synthesis problem for free. In particular, we show that, if the attacker cannot attack unobservable events to the supervisor, then the reductions can be carried out in polynomial time. We also provide a brief discussion on some other conditions under which the exponential blowup in state size can be avoided. Finally, we show how the reduction based synthesis procedure can be extended for the synthesis of successful covert actuator attackers that also eavesdrop the control commands issued by the supervisor.Comment: The paper has been accepted for the journal Discrete Event Dynamic System