Resilient Control in the Presence of Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems, which are ubiquitous in modern critical infrastructure, oftentimes rely on sending actuation commands and sensor measurements over a network, subjecting this information to potential man-in-the-middle attacks. These attacks can take the form of denial of service attacks or integrity attacks. Previous approaches at ensuring the resiliency of the overall control system against these types of attacks have leveraged functional redundancy in the system, including resilient estimation and reconfigurable control. However, these approaches are only able to ensure resiliency up to a particular subset of the actuator commands and sensor measurements being compromised. In contrast, we introduce a resiliency mechanism in this paper that can ensure safety for the overall system when all the actuator commands and sensor measurements are compromised. In addition, this approach does not require the implementation of any detection algorithm. We leverage communication redundancy in the number of pathways across the network to guarantee safety when up to a certain percentage of those pathways are compromised. The conditions under which safety is guaranteed are presented along with the resiliency mechanism itself, and our results are illustrated via simulation.