Event Concealment and Concealability Enforcement in Discrete Event Systems Under Partial Observation

TL;DR

This paper explores how to prevent an external observer from inferring secret events in discrete event systems by analyzing concealability and designing strategies to manipulate observed event sequences.

Contribution

It introduces systematic methods to detect unconcealable secret events and verifies concealability enforcement strategies with polynomial complexity techniques.

Findings

Identifies conditions under which secret events are unconcealable.

Provides algorithms for verifying concealability enforcement.

Proposes a polynomial-time construction for enforcement strategies.

Abstract

Inspired by privacy problems where the behavior of a system should not be revealed to an external curious observer, we investigate event concealment and concealability enforcement in discrete event systems modeled as non-deterministic finite automata under partial observation. Given a subset of secret events in a given system, concealability holds if the occurrence of all secret events remains hidden to a curious observer (an eavesdropper). A secret event is said to be (at least under some executions) unconcealable (inferable) if its occurrence can be indirectly determined with certainty after a finite number of observations. When concealability of a system does not hold (i.e., one or more secret events are unconcealable), we analyze how a defender, placed at the interface of the system with the eavesdropper, can be used to enforce concealability. The defender takes as input each observed event of the system and outputs a carefully modified event sequence (seen by the eavesdropper) using event deletion, insertion, or replacement. The defender is said to be C-enforceable if, following the occurrence of the secret events and regardless of subsequent activity generated by the system, it can always deploy a strategy to manipulate observations and conceal the events perpetually. We discuss systematic procedures to detect the presence of unconcealable secret events and verify C-Enforceability using techniques from state estimation and event diagnosis. We also propose a polynomial complexity construction for obtaining one necessary and one sufficient condition for C-Enforceability.