A Moving-Horizon Hybrid Stochastic Game for Secure Control of Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel moving-horizon hybrid stochastic game model for securing cyber-physical systems, enabling real-time defense strategy computation against multiple attack types while balancing security and control costs.

Contribution

It develops a new hybrid game framework combining physical and cyber states, along with scalable algorithms for real-time defense policy synthesis in CPS security.

Findings

Proposed a suboptimal value iteration algorithm with proven bounds.

Developed a moving-horizon approach for real-time strategy computation.

Numerical examples demonstrate improved security and cost trade-offs.

Abstract

In this paper, we establish a zero-sum, hybrid state stochastic game model for designing defense policies for cyber-physical systems against different types of attacks. With the increasingly integrated properties of cyber-physical systems (CPS) today, security is a challenge for critical infrastructures. Though resilient control and detecting techniques for a specific model of attack have been proposed, to analyze and design detection and defense mechanisms against multiple types of attacks for CPSs requires new system frameworks. Besides security, other requirements such as optimal control cost also need to be considered. The hybrid game model we propose in this work contains physical states that are described by the system dynamics, and a cyber state that represents the detection mode of the system composed by a set of subsystems. A strategy means selecting a subsystem by combining one controller, one estimator and one detector among a finite set of candidate components at each state. Based on the game model, we propose a suboptimal value iteration algorithm for a finite horizon game, and prove that the algorithm results an upper bound for the value of the finite horizon game. A moving-horizon approach is also developed in order to provide a scalable and real-time computation of the switching strategies. Both algorithms aims at obtaining a saddle-point equilibrium policy for balancing the system's security overhead and control cost. The paper illustrates these concepts using numerical examples, and we compare the results with previously system designs that only equipped with one type of controller.