Robustness of attack-resilient state estimators

Abstract

The interaction between information technology and phys ical world makes Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) vulnerable to malicious attacks beyond the standard cyber attacks. This has motivated the need for attack-resilient state estimation. Yet, the existing state-estimators are based on the non-realistic assumption that the exact system model is known. Consequently, in this work we present a method for state estimation in presence of attacks, for systems with noise and modeling errors. When the the estimated states are used by a state-based feedback controller, we show that the attacker cannot destabilize the system by exploiting the difference between the model used for the state estimation and the real physical dynamics of the system. Furthermore, we describe how implementation issues such as jitter, latency and synchronization errors can be mapped into parameters of the state estimation procedure that describe modeling errors, and provide a bound on the state-estimation error caused by modeling errors. This enables mapping control performance requirements into real-time (i.e., timing related) specifications imposed on the underlying platform. Finally, we illustrate and experimentally evaluate this approach on an unmanned ground vehicle case-study.