Synthesis of Supervisors Robust Against Sensor Deception Attacks

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to synthesize supervisory controllers that are resilient to sensor deception attacks in discrete event control systems, ensuring system safety despite malicious sensor manipulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel synthesis approach combining automata games and supervisory control theory to create supervisors robust against sensor edit attacks.

Findings

Provides necessary and sufficient conditions for attack-robust supervision.

Develops a solution methodology blending game theory with control theory.

Ensures system safety under sensor deception attacks.

Abstract

We consider feedback control systems where sensor readings may be compromised by a malicious attacker intending on causing damage to the system. We study this problem at the supervisory layer of the control system, using discrete event systems techniques. We assume that the attacker can edit the outputs from the sensors of the system before they reach the supervisory controller. In this context, we formulate the problem of synthesizing a supervisor that is robust against the class of edit attacks on the sensor readings and present a solution methodology for this problem. This methodology blends techniques from games on automata with imperfect information with results from supervisory control theory of partially-observed discrete event systems. Necessary and sufficient conditions are provided for the investigated problem.