Networked Control under Random and Malicious Packet Losses

Abstract: We study cyber security issues in networked control of a linear dynamical system. Specifically, the dynamical system and the controller are assumed to be connected through a communication channel that face malicious attacks as well as random packet losses due to unreliability of transmissions. We provide a probabilistic characterization for the link failures which allows us to study combined effects of malicious and random packet losses. We first investigate almost sure stabilization under an event-triggered control law, where we utilize Lyapunov-like functions to characterize the triggering times at which the plant and the controller attempt to exchange state and control data over the network. We then provide a look at the networked control problem from the attacker's perspective and explore malicious attacks that cause instability. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our results with numerical examples.