Almost sure detection of the presence of malicious components in cyber–physical systems

This article studies a fundamental problem of security of cyber–physical systems (CPSs): that of detecting, almost surely, the presence of malicious components in the CPS. We assume that some of the actuators may be malicious while all sensors are honest. We introduce a novel idea of separability of state trajectories generated by CPSs in two situations: those under the nominal no-attack situation and those under the influence of an attacker. We establish its connection to the security of CPSs, particularly in detecting the presence of malicious actuators (if any) in them. As primary contributions, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the aforementioned detection in CPSs modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Moreover, we focus on the mechanism of perturbing the pre-determined control policies of the honest agents in CPSs modeled as stochastic linear systems, by injecting a certain class of random process called private excitation; sufficient conditions for detectability and non-detectability of the presence of malicious actuators, assuming that the policies are randomized history-dependent and randomized Markovian, are established. Several technical aspects of our results are discussed extensively.