Encrypted control for networked systems -- An illustrative introduction and current challenges

Cloud computing and distributed computing are becoming ubiquitous in many modern control systems such as smart grids, building automation, robot swarms or intelligent transportation systems. Compared to "isolated" control systems, the advantages of cloud-based and distributed control systems are, in particular, resource pooling and outsourcing, rapid scalability, and high performance. However, these capabilities do not come without risks. In fact, the involved communication and processing of sensitive data via public networks and on third-party platforms promote, among other cyberthreats, eavesdropping and manipulation of data. Encrypted control addresses this security gap and provides confidentiality of the processed data in the entire control loop. This paper presents a tutorial-style introduction to this young but emerging field in the framework of secure control for networked dynamical systems.Comment: The paper is a preprint of an accepted paper in the IEEE Control Systems Magazin

Encrypted State Estimation in Networked Control Systems

In this paper, we propose a distributed state observer in which the data of measurements and state estimates are protected by homomorphic cryptosystem. The proposed observer network is composed of local observers, where each of them utilizes encrypted local measurement, encryption of plant input, and encrypted estimates transmitted from its neighbors. All the operations in the network are performed on encrypted data without decryption, and the full state is recovered in every local observer as an encrypted message. Assuming the characteristic polynomial and the minimal polynomial of the state matrix for the plant are the same, the parameters in the observers are chosen to be integers. This not only allows finite-time convergence for the state estimates, but also makes the encrypted dynamic observers operate for infinite time horizon.N