Reducing Attack Vulnerabilities Through Decentralized Event-Triggered Control

Abstract

Decentralized control systems are widely used in a number of situations and applications. In order for these systems to function properly and achieve their desired goals, information must be propagated between agents, which requires connecting to a network. To reduce opportunities for attacks that may be carried out through the network, we design an event-triggered mechanism for network connection and communication that minimizes the amount of time agents must be connected to the network, in turn decreasing communication costs. This mechanism is a function of only local information and ensures stability for the overall system in attack-free scenarios. Our approach distinguishes itself from current decentralized event-triggered control strategies by considering scenarios where agents are not always connected to the network to receive critical information from other agents and by considering scenarios where the communication graph is undirected and connected. An algorithm describing this network connection and communication protocol is provided, and our approach is illustrated via simulation.

Ensuring Resilience Against Stealthy Attacks on Cyber-Physical Systems

“…For software rejuvenation this time period corresponds to the secure execution interval when the software can be trusted, for overlay networks this is the set of times where data is sent over uncompromised pathways, and for reconfigurable control and resilient estimation this is the set of times where a subset of the actuators or sensors can be trusted. Some approaches have leveraged decentralized eventtriggered control to design protocols that minimize the amount of time components are untrusted or potentially compromised [44], [45].…”