TECoSA Seminar – Resilient Supervisory Control Against Smart Cyberattacks in Discrete-Event Dynamic Systems

We aim to bring you a TECoSA Seminar at kl.15 on the first Thursday of each month. This Autumn they will once again be on-line, and all are welcome to join (members accept the Outlook invite, non-members please email “tecosa-admin@kth.se”). Each invited speaker will talk for about 40 minutes, followed by a panel discussion coordinated by TECoSA members.

The series continues with a presentation from Dr Rong Su, Associate Professor at the School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Nanyang Technological University.  Please see the abstract and short biography below; and you can read more about his research at: https://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/rsu/

Panel: Lei Feng (Chair), Panagiotis Papadimitratos and Henrik Sandberg

Resilient Supervisory Control Against Smart Cyberattacks in Discrete-Event Dynamic Systems

ABSTRACT: With the continuous advancement of ICT, we are enjoying unprecedented connectivity around the world. However, the threat of cyberattacks has more frequently become the center of attention, which has been attracting lots of research from different communities, including the discrete-event system community, where different attack models are conjectured and analyzed, upon which relevant defense techniques have been proposed. Considering the diversity of cyberattacks on discrete-event systems, in this talk I will focus on a special type called “smart” attacks, which, if exist, will not be detected by the supervisor until an unstoppable process takes place that may lead to damage. An attack may be applied either to an observation channel, or to a command channel, or to both simultaneously. After introducing some models of observation and command channel attacks, I will describe, from an attacker’s point of view, how to synthesize a smart attack strategy. Sufficient and necessary conditions will be given to ensure the existence of such a strategy. It turns out that the synthesis of an attack-resilient supervisor is more challenging, owing to not only complexity concerns, but also possible undecidability of solution existence in a general setup. Nevertheless, for a special observation-channel attack, where an attacker only aims for possible but not necessarily assured damage, captured by the concept of weak attackability, the existence of a resilient supervisor is decidable.

BIO: Dr Su’s research interests include multi-agent systems, discrete-event system theory, model-based fault diagnosis, cyber security analysis and synthesis, control and optimization of complex networks with applications in flexible manufacturing, intelligent transportation, human-robot interface, power management and green building. In the aforementioned areas he has more than 180 journal and conference publications, 2 granted US/Singapore patents, and 5 technical disclosures, and has been involved in several projects sponsored by Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF), Singapore Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore Ministry of Education (MoE), Singapore Civil Aviation Authority (CAAS) and Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB). Dr Su is a senior member of IEEE, and an associate editor for Automatica (IFAC), Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems: Theory and Applications, and Journal of Control and Decision. He is also the Chair of the Technical Committee on Smart Cities in the IEEE Control Systems Society.