Engineering topics

Moura, Jose M. F.

Publications and source records attributed to Moura, Jose M. F..

3 records

DOE OSTI2018

Resilient Distributed Estimation: Sensor Attacks

Here, this paper studies multi-agent distributed estimation under sensor attacks. Individual agents make sensor measurements of an unknown parameter belonging to a compact set, and, at every time step, a fraction of the agents’ sensor measurements may fall under attack and take arbitrary values. We present the Saturated Innovation Update (SIU) algorithm for distributed estimation resilient to sensor attacks. Under the iterative SIU algorithm, if less than one half of the agent sensors fall under attack, then, all of the agents’ estimates converge at a polynomial rate (with respect to the number of iterations) to the true parameter. The resilience of SIU to sensor attacks does not depend on the topology of the inter-agent communication network, as long as it remains connected. We demonstrate the performance of SIU with numerical examples.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2017

Cyber-Physical Attacks With Control Objectives

This study studies attackers with control objectives against cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The goal of the attacker is to counteract the CPS's controller and move the system to a target state while evading detection. We formulate a cost function that reflects the attacker's goals, and, using dynamic programming, we show that the optimal attack strategy reduces to a linear feedback of the attacker's state estimate. By changing the parameters of the cost function, we show how an attacker can design optimal attacks to balance the control objective and the detection avoidance objective. In conclusion, we provide a numerical illustration based on a remotely controlled helicopter under attack.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2017

Optimal Attack Strategies Subject to Detection Constraints Against Cyber-Physical Systems

This paper studies an attacker against a cyberphysical system (CPS) whose goal is to move the state of a CPS to a target state while ensuring that his or her probability of being detected does not exceed a given bound. The attacker’s probability of being detected is related to the nonnegative bias induced by his or her attack on the CPS’s detection statistic. We formulate a linear quadratic cost function that captures the attacker’s control goal and establish constraints on the induced bias that reflect the attacker’s detection-avoidance objectives. When the attacker is constrained to be detected at the false-alarm rate of the detector, we show that the optimal attack strategy reduces to a linear feedback of the attacker’s state estimate. In the case that the attacker’s bias is upper bounded by a positive constant, we provide two algorithms – an optimal algorithm and a sub-optimal, less computationally intensive algorithm – to find suitable attack sequences. Lastly, we illustrate our attack strategies in numerical examples based on a remotely-controlled helicopter under attack.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗