Secure State Estimation and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems: A Survey

TLDR

Cyber‑physical systems integrate physical processes with cyber infrastructure, are ubiquitous in energy, transportation, manufacturing, and healthcare, but their tight coupling creates unique vulnerabilities that enable sophisticated cyberattacks to degrade performance, disrupt services, and cause failures, making secure state estimation and control essential for reliable operation. This survey reviews the state‑of‑the‑art in secure state estimation and control for CPSs and identifies open research challenges to guide future work. The review summarizes recent advances in secure estimation and control, classifies secure control strategies into centralized, distributed, and resource‑aware categories, and illustrates their applicability with case studies on water distribution and wide‑area power systems.

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) empower the integration of physical processes and cyber infrastructure with the aid of ubiquitous computation resources and communication capabilities. CPSs have permeated modern society and found extensive applications in a wide variety of areas, including energy, transportation, advanced manufacturing, and medical health. The security of CPSs against cyberattacks has been regarded as a long-standing concern. However, CPSs suffer from extendable vulnerabilities that are beyond classical networked systems due to the tight integration of cyber and physical components. Sophisticated and malicious cyberattacks continue to emerge to adversely impact CPS operation, resulting in performance degradation, service interruption, and system failure. Secure state estimation and control technologies play a vital role in warranting reliable monitoring and operation of safety-critical CPSs. This article provides a review of the state-of-the-art results for secure state estimation and control of CPSs. Specifically, the latest development of secure state estimation is summarized in light of different performance indicators and defense strategies. Then, the recent results on secure control are discussed and classified into three categories: 1) centralized secure control; 2) distributed secure control; and 3) resource-aware secure control. Furthermore, two specific application examples of water supply distribution systems and wide-area power systems are presented to demonstrate the applicability of secure state estimation and control approaches. Finally, several challenging issues are discussed to direct future research.