Secure impulsive synchronization in Lipschitz-type multi-agent systems subject to deception attacks

Abstract

Cyber attacks pose severe threats on synchronization of multi-agent systems. Deception attack, as a typical type of cyber attack, can bypass the surveillance of the attack detection mechanism silently, resulting in a heavy loss. Therefore, the problem of mean-square bounded synchronization in multi-agent systems subject to deception attacks is investigated in this paper. The control signals can be replaced with false data from controller-to-actuator channels or the controller. The success of the attack is measured through a stochastic variable. A distributed impulsive controller using a pinning strategy is redesigned, which ensures that mean-square bounded synchronization is achieved in the presence of deception attacks. Some sufficient conditions are derived, in which upper bounds of the synchronization error are given. Finally, two numerical simulations with symmetric and asymmetric network topologies are given to illustrate the theoretical results.