On the Computational Complexity of the Secure State-Reconstruction Problem

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the computational complexity of reconstructing the state of a linear system from sensor measurements that have been corrupted by an adversary. The first result establishes that the problem is, in general, NP-hard. We then introduce the notion of eigenvalue observability and show that the state can be reconstructed in polynomial time when each eigenvalue is observable by at least $2s+1$ sensors and at most $s$ sensors are corrupted by an adversary. However, there is a gap between eigenvalue observability and the possibility of reconstructing the state despite attacks - this gap has been characterized in the literature by the notion of sparse observability. To better understand this, we show that when the $\mathbf{A}$ matrix of the linear system has unitary geometric multiplicity, the gap disappears, i.e., eigenvalue observability coincides with sparse observability, and there exists a polynomial time algorithm to reconstruct the state provided the state can be reconstructed.