Performance Analysis of Event-Triggered Consensus Control for Multi-agent Systems under Cyber-Physical Attacks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how cyber-physical attacks can disrupt multi-agent consensus control by deceiving event-triggered mechanisms, leading to network disconnectivity or Zeno behavior, with simulations validating the findings.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous analysis of attack impacts on event-triggered consensus protocols and reveals new vulnerabilities in common mechanisms.

Findings

Deception attacks can cause non-triggering failures, disconnecting agents.

Attacks can induce continuous triggering, leading to Zeno behavior.

Simulations confirm theoretical attack effects on network performance.

Abstract

This work presents a rigorous analysis of the adverse effects of cyber-physical attacks on the performance of multi-agent consensus with event-triggered control protocols. It is shown how a strategic malicious attack on sensors and actuators can deceive the triggering condition of both state-based event-triggered mechanism and combinational state-based event-triggered mechanism, which are commonplace and widely used in the literature. More precisely, it is first shown that a deception attack in the case of combinational state-based event-triggered mechanism can result in a non-triggering misbehavior, in the sense that the compromised agent does not trigger any event and consequently results in partial feedback disconnectivity by preventing information from reaching the local neighbors of the compromised agent. This indicates that the combinational state-based event-triggered mechanism can be leveraged by the attacker to harm the network connectivity by rendering the recent data unavailable to agents. It is then shown that the deception attack in the case of state-based event-triggered mechanism can result in a continuous-triggering misbehavior in the sense that the event-triggered mechanism continuously generates triggering events resulting in undesirable phenomenon of Zeno behavior. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the theoretical findings.