Synthesis of Distributed Covert Sensor–Actuator Attackers

Abstract

This paper investigates the synthesis of distributed attackers for distributed discrete-event systems (DES), where the distributed attackers could implement sensor insertion/deletion/replacement attacks and actuator enablement/disablement attacks. The distributed attackers to be synthesized should fulfill the following goals: 1) each local sensor-actuator attacker needs to remain covert against all the distributed monitors which are used to detect the existence of attacks, 2) the distributed sensor-actuator attackers need to cooperate to implement attacks such that the damage infliction could be realized. To solve this distributed attacker synthesis problem, our solution methodology is to first model the original problem as a distributed supervisor synthesis problem by modeling each system component as a finite-state automaton and then perform incremental synthesis with a heuristic that takes the special structure of this distributed synthesis problem into consideration. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated via an example regarding the transportation task of multiple robots.