Dual-Rate Control Framework With Safe Watermarking Against Deception Attacks

This article presents a novel secure-control framework against sensor deception attacks. The vulnerability of cyber-physical systems with respect to sensor deceptive attacks makes that all sensor measurements are not reliable until the system security is assured by an attack detection module. Most of the active attack detection strategies require some time to assess the system security, while injecting a watermark signal to ease the detection. However, the injection of watermark signals deteriorates the performance and stability of the plant. The proposed control framework consists of a dual-rate control (DRC) that is able to stabilize the plant using: 1) a model predictive controller that operates at a slower sampling time; 2) a state-feedback predictor-based controller that operates in the nominal sampling time disregarding the use of the untrustworthy measurements until the attack detector is able to certify the security; and 3) a reconfiguration block (RB) for palliating the effect of the watermarking. Simulation results indicate the efficacy of the proposed DRC framework to defend the system from cyber-attacks and the ability of the RB to improve the closed-loop performance during the watermark injection.