Deception in Linear-Quadratic Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deception strategy within linear-quadratic control systems to mislead adversaries while remaining undetected, providing theoretical solutions and numerical validation.

Contribution

It develops a novel optimal deceptive control law in the LQ framework, balancing deception effectiveness and detectability.

Findings

The proposed control law effectively deceives the red team with high probability.

Numerical results confirm the framework's ability to remain undetected while misleading adversaries.

Analytical bounds quantify detection probabilities under deception.

Abstract

Systems operating in adversarial environments may inadvertently leak sensitive information to adversaries. To address this challenge, we revisit the linear-quadratic control framework and introduce deception to actively mislead adversaries. Specifically, we consider a blue-team agent, observed by a red-team agent, that seeks to minimize a quadratic cost while introducing perturbations to its trajectories over time. These perturbations are designed to corrupt the red team's observations and, consequently, any downstream inferences, while remaining undetected by a red team using sequential hypothesis testing. We implement this idea by augmenting the blue team's quadratic cost with a likelihood ratio statistic. Under this augmented control problem, we derive a semi-explicit solution for the optimal deceptive control law and establish corresponding well-posedness results. In addition, we provide both numerical approximations and analytical bounds for the probability that the red team detects the blue team's deceptive strategies. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in deceiving the red team while remaining undetected with probability near 1.