Synthesis of Covert Sensor Attacks in Networked Discrete-Event Systems with Non-FIFO Channels

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to synthesize covert sensor attacks in networked discrete-event systems with non-FIFO channels, enabling the design of attacks that remain hidden while manipulating observable events within bounded delays.

Contribution

It introduces a novel synthesis approach for covert sensor attacks in networked DES, modeling the problem as a Ramadge-Wonham supervisor synthesis and proving the existence of supremal covert attacks.

Findings

Supremal covert sensor attacks exist in networked DES.

Effective computation of covert attacks using normality-based synthesis.

Applicable to damage-reachable and damage-nonblocking scenarios.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the covert sensor attack synthesis problem in the framework of supervisory control of networked discrete-event systems (DES), where the observation channel and the control channel are assumed to be non-FIFO and have bounded network delays. We focus on the class of sensor attacks satisfying the following properties: 1) the attacker might not have the same observation capability as the networked supervisor; 2) the attacker aims to remain covert, i.e., hide its presence against the networked monitor; 3) the attacker could insert, delete, or replace compromised observable events; 4) it performs bounded sensor attacks, i.e., the length of each string output of the sensor attacker is upper bounded by a given constant. The solution methodology proposed in this work is to solve the covert sensor attack synthesis problem for networked DES by modeling it as the well studied Ramadge-Wonham supervisor synthesis problem, and the constructions work for both the damage-reachable attacks and the damage-nonblocking attacks. In particular, we show the supremal covert sensor attack exists in the networked setup and can be effectively computed by using the normality property based synthesis approach.