Dynamic Games for Secure and Resilient Control System Design

TL;DR

This paper reviews how dynamic game theory models can enhance security and resilience in complex, multi-layer control systems by capturing strategic interactions and addressing cross-layer design challenges.

Contribution

It introduces dynamic game variants for different control system layers and discusses their role in improving robustness, security, and resilience against adversarial threats.

Findings

Game-theoretic methods reveal fundamental tradeoffs in security and resilience.

Cross-layer approaches improve system performance in adversarial environments.

Dynamic games facilitate understanding of multi-layer control system interactions.

Abstract

Modern control systems are featured by their hierarchical structure composing of cyber, physical, and human layers. The intricate dependencies among multiple layers and units of modern control systems require an integrated framework to address cross-layer design issues related to security and resilience challenges. To this end, game theory provides a bottom-up modeling paradigm to capture the strategic interactions among multiple components of the complex system and enables a holistic view to understand and design cyber-physical-human control systems. In this review, we first provide a multi-layer perspective toward increasingly complex and integrated control systems and then introduce several variants of dynamic games for modeling different layers of control systems. We present game-theoretic methods for understanding the fundamental tradeoffs of robustness, security, and resilience and developing a clean-slate cross-layer approach to enhance the system performance in various adversarial environments. This review also includes three quintessential research problems that represent three research directions where dynamic game approaches can bridge between multiple research areas and make significant contributions to the design of modern control systems. The paper is concluded with a discussion on emerging areas of research that crosscut dynamic games and control systems.