Control of Large-Scale Networked Cyberphysical Systems Using Cryptographic Techniques

TL;DR

This paper develops a methodology for designing secure networked control systems that integrate cryptographic techniques to protect data against malicious attacks while maintaining control performance.

Contribution

It introduces a separation-based approach combining cryptography with control algorithms to ensure security and functionality in large-scale cyberphysical systems.

Findings

Cryptographic techniques effectively protect data in networked control systems.

The proposed methodology maintains control performance under security constraints.

Secure control design is feasible with the separation principle.

Abstract

This paper aims to create a secure environment for networked control systems composed of multiple dynamic entities and computational control units via networking, in the presence of disclosure attacks. In particular, we consider the situation where some dynamic entities or control units are vulnerable to attacks and can become malicious. Our objective is to ensure that the input and output data of the benign entities are protected from the malicious entities as well as protected when they are transferred over the networks in a distributed environment. Both these security requirements are achieved using cryptographic techniques. However, the use of cryptographic mechanisms brings additional challenges to the design of controllers in the encrypted state space; the closed-loop system gains and states are required to match the specified cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the design of secure networked control systems integrating the cryptographic mechanisms with the control algorithms. The approach is based on the separation principle, with the cryptographic techniques addressing the security requirements and the control algorithms satisfying their performance requirements.