Asymptotic Security of Control Systems by Covert Reaction: Repeated Signaling Game with Undisclosed Belief

This study investigates the relationship between resilience of control systems to attacks and the information available to malicious attackers. Specifically, it is shown that control systems are guaranteed to be secure in an asymptotic manner by rendering reactions against potentially harmful actions covert. The behaviors of the attacker and the defender are analyzed through a repeated signaling game with an undisclosed belief under covert reactions. In the typical setting of signaling games, reactions conducted by the defender are supposed to be public information and the measurability enables the attacker to accurately trace transitions of the defender’s belief on existence of a malicious attacker. In contrast, the belief in the game considered in this paper is undisclosed and hence common equilibrium concepts can no longer be employed for the analysis. To surmount this difficulty, a novel framework for decision of reasonable strategies of the players in the game is introduced. Based on the presented framework, it is revealed that any reasonable strategy chosen by a rational malicious attacker converges to the benign behavior as long as the reactions performed by the defender are unobservable to the attacker. The result provides an explicit relationship between resilience and information, which indicates the importance of covertness of reactions for designing secure control systems.