Security and Infiltration of Networks: A Structural Controllability and Observability Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the role of structural controllability (s-controllability) in the design of secure linear-time-invariant networked systems. We reason about secure network design in the face of two attack vectors: a "Disrupt" attack where the infiltrator's objective is to perturb the network to render it unusable, and a "Highjack and eavesdrop" attack to actively control and probe the network. For the former attack, strong s-controllable input sets are chosen to control the network to provide robustness to these attacks. Weak s-controllable input sets are selected by infiltrators for the "Highjack and eavesdrop" attack so as to generically guarantee a successful attack. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for weak and strong s-controllability involving matchings over a bipartite graph representation of the network. We also provide a brief analysis of s-controllability over special families of networks. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.