302 research outputs found
Centralized Versus Decentralized Detection of Attacks in Stochastic Interconnected Systems
We consider a security problem for interconnected systems governed by linear,
discrete, time-invariant, stochastic dynamics, where the objective is to detect
exogenous attacks by processing the measurements at different locations. We
consider two classes of detectors, namely centralized and decentralized
detectors, which differ primarily in their knowledge of the system model. In
particular, a decentralized detector has a model of the dynamics of the
isolated subsystems, but is unaware of the interconnection signals that are
exchanged among subsystems. Instead, a centralized detector has a model of the
entire dynamical system. We characterize the performance of the two detectors
and show that, depending on the system and attack parameters, each of the
detectors can outperform the other. In particular, it may be possible for the
decentralized detector to outperform its centralized counterpart, despite
having less information about the system dynamics, and this surprising property
is due to the nature of the considered attack detection problem. To complement
our results on the detection of attacks, we propose and solve an optimization
problem to design attacks that maximally degrade the system performance while
maintaining a pre-specified degree of detectability. Finally, we validate our
findings via numerical studies on an electric power system.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (TAC
Consensus Computation in Unreliable Networks: A System Theoretic Approach
This work addresses the problem of ensuring trustworthy computation in a
linear consensus network. A solution to this problem is relevant for several
tasks in multi-agent systems including motion coordination, clock
synchronization, and cooperative estimation. In a linear consensus network, we
allow for the presence of misbehaving agents, whose behavior deviate from the
nominal consensus evolution. We model misbehaviors as unknown and unmeasurable
inputs affecting the network, and we cast the misbehavior detection and
identification problem into an unknown-input system theoretic framework. We
consider two extreme cases of misbehaving agents, namely faulty (non-colluding)
and malicious (Byzantine) agents. First, we characterize the set of inputs that
allow misbehaving agents to affect the consensus network while remaining
undetected and/or unidentified from certain observing agents. Second, we
provide worst-case bounds for the number of concurrent faulty or malicious
agents that can be detected and identified. Precisely, the consensus network
needs to be 2k+1 (resp. k+1) connected for k malicious (resp. faulty) agents to
be generically detectable and identifiable by every well behaving agent. Third,
we quantify the effect of undetectable inputs on the final consensus value.
Fourth, we design three algorithms to detect and identify misbehaving agents.
The first and the second algorithm apply fault detection techniques, and
affords complete detection and identification if global knowledge of the
network is available to each agent, at a high computational cost. The third
algorithm is designed to exploit the presence in the network of weakly
interconnected subparts, and provides local detection and identification of
misbehaving agents whose behavior deviates more than a threshold, which is
quantified in terms of the interconnection structure
Controllability Metrics, Limitations and Algorithms for Complex Networks
This paper studies the problem of controlling complex networks, that is, the
joint problem of selecting a set of control nodes and of designing a control
input to steer a network to a target state. For this problem (i) we propose a
metric to quantify the difficulty of the control problem as a function of the
required control energy, (ii) we derive bounds based on the system dynamics
(network topology and weights) to characterize the tradeoff between the control
energy and the number of control nodes, and (iii) we propose an open-loop
control strategy with performance guarantees. In our strategy we select control
nodes by relying on network partitioning, and we design the control input by
leveraging optimal and distributed control techniques. Our findings show
several control limitations and properties. For instance, for Schur stable and
symmetric networks: (i) if the number of control nodes is constant, then the
control energy increases exponentially with the number of network nodes, (ii)
if the number of control nodes is a fixed fraction of the network nodes, then
certain networks can be controlled with constant energy independently of the
network dimension, and (iii) clustered networks may be easier to control
because, for sufficiently many control nodes, the control energy depends only
on the controllability properties of the clusters and on their coupling
strength. We validate our results with examples from power networks, social
networks, and epidemics spreading
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