Opacity Enforcing Supervisory Control Using Nondeterministic Supervisors

In this article, we investigate the enforcement of opacity via supervisory control in the context of discrete-event systems. A system is said to be opaque if the intruder, which is modeled as a passive observer, can never infer confidently that the system is at a secret state. The design objective i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on automatic control Vol. 67; no. 12; pp. 6567 - 6582
Main Authors: Xie, Yifan, Yin, Xiang, Li, Shaoyuan
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2022
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Aerospace electronics
Algorithms
Closed loop systems
Closed loops
Control systems
Discrete event systems
Discrete-event systems (DES)
Dynamical systems
Feedback control
Observers
Opacity
Security
Supervisors
Supervisory control
Synthesis
ISSN:0018-9286, 1558-2523
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In this article, we investigate the enforcement of opacity via supervisory control in the context of discrete-event systems. A system is said to be opaque if the intruder, which is modeled as a passive observer, can never infer confidently that the system is at a secret state. The design objective is to synthesize a supervisor such that the closed-loop system is opaque even when the control policy is publicly known. In this article, we propose a new approach for enforcing opacity using nondeterministic supervisors. A nondeterministic supervisor is a decision mechanism that provides a set of control decisions at each instant, and randomly picks a specific control decision from the decision set to actually control the plant. Compared with the standard deterministic control mechanism, such a nondeterministic control mechanism can enhance the plausible deniability of the controlled system as the online control decision is a random realization and cannot be implicitly inferred from the control policy. We provide a sound and complete algorithm for synthesizing a nondeterministic opacity-enforcing supervisor. Furthermore, we show that nondeterministic supervisors are strictly more powerful than deterministic supervisors in the sense that there may exist a nondeterministic opacity-enforcing supervisor even when deterministic supervisors cannot enforce opacity.
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ISSN:0018-9286
1558-2523
DOI:10.1109/TAC.2021.3131125