Secure Sensor Design for Resiliency of Control Systems Prior to Attack Detection

We introduce a new defense mechanism for stochastic control systems with control objectives, to enhance their resilience before the detection of any attacks. To this end, we cautiously design the outputs of the sensors that monitor the state of the system since the attackers need the sensor outputs for their malicious objectives in stochastic control scenarios. Different from the defense mechanisms that seek to detect infiltration or to improve detectability of the attacks, the proposed approach seeks to minimize the damage of possible attacks before they actually have even been detected. We, specifically, consider a controlled Gauss-Markov process, where the controller could have been infiltrated into at any time within the system's operation. Within the framework of game-theoretic hierarchical equilibrium, we provide a semi-definite programming based algorithm to compute the optimal linear secure sensor outputs that enhance the resiliency of control systems prior to attack detection.