Observability-based secure state encryption design for cyberphysical systems

Abstract

While the area of cryptography has progressed considerably over the last few decades, its applications to networked dynamical systems are only being considered recently. In this paper, we view the encryption problem for cyberphysical systems through the lens of modern control theory. Specifically, an encryption-like algorithm is proposed for a general nonlinear dynamical system by exploiting the observability property of dynamical systems. The proposed encryption design is applied to augment the security of a recently developed signal authentication mechanism in networked multi-agent systems. The effectiveness of proposed method is studied through numerical simulations.