Secure-by-construction Controller Synthesis

Constructing Safe and Secure Cyber-Physical Systems

Over recent decades, cyber-physical systems (CPS) have become the backbone of an increasingly intelligent and interconnected world. However, the safety- and security-critical nature of CPS raises significant concerns. In particular, any design flaw or malfunction in these systems can lead to disastrous outcomes, including loss of life. Meanwhile, due to the close integration of cyber components and physical entities, CPS are also particularly vulnerable to a range of security threats and attacks. Consequently, there is a growing need to address both safety and security concerns in modern CPS.

In this project, we present a provably-correct scheme for building secure-by-construction controllers that enforce safety and security properties simultaneously in CPS. Traditional methods often prioritize safety, leaving security considerations for later stages, resulting in costly and time-intensive validation processes.

Highlights of the results:

  1. We proposed an abstraction-free framework for synthesizing the controllers enforcing both safety and security properties, avoiding the curse of dimensionality attributed to building finite abstractions over the original continuous-space systems.

  2. For security properties, we consider both approximate initial-state and infinite-step opacity over continuous-space systems.

Related papers

  1. B. Zhong, S. Liu, M. Caccamo, and M. Zamani, Secure-by-Construction Synthesis for Conrtrol System, In: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, under review, 2023.

  2. B. Zhong, S. Liu, M. Caccamo, and M. Zamani, Secure-by-construction controller synthesis via control barrier functions, In: Proceedings of The 22nd IFAC World Congress, Vol. 56 No. 2, pp. 239-245, 2023.