Maximum Information Release While Ensuring Opacity in Discrete Event Systems

Opacity is important in investigating secrecy, privacy, and other properties in general systems that can be modeled as discrete event systems. To ensure opacity, a controller may be used to control information released to the public. For transparency and other reasons, it is often desired that the information released to the public be maximum, as long as opacity is not violated. In this paper, we investigate how to release the maximum information while ensuring opacity. We find a necessary and sufficient condition for an information release policy to ensure opacity. We also develop methods and algorithms to design a controller that releases maximum information. We consider both strong opacity and weak opacity. We apply the results to the dining cryptographers problem.

[1]  Raymond T. Yeh,et al.  Structural equivalence of automata , 1968, Mathematical systems theory.

[2]  Derick Wood,et al.  Deterministic Regular Languages , 1991, STACS.

[3]  Maciej Koutny,et al.  Opacity generalised to transition systems , 2005, International Journal of Information Security.

[4]  Raja Sengupta,et al.  Diagnosability of discrete-event systems , 1995, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control..

[5]  Stéphane Lafortune,et al.  Enforcement of opacity properties using insertion functions , 2012, 2012 IEEE 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[6]  Bo Zhang,et al.  Polynomial algorithms to check opacity in discrete event systems , 2012, 2012 24th Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC).

[7]  Walter Murray Wonham,et al.  On observability of discrete-event systems , 1988, Inf. Sci..

[8]  Feng Lin,et al.  Opacity of discrete event systems and its applications , 2011, Autom..

[9]  Hervé Marchand,et al.  Dynamic Observers for the Synthesis of Opaque Systems , 2009, ATVA.

[10]  Feng Lin,et al.  On-line control of partially observed discrete event systems , 1994, Discret. Event Dyn. Syst..

[11]  Christoforos N. Hadjicostis,et al.  Opacity-Enforcing Supervisory Strategies via State Estimator Constructions , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[12]  Feng Lin,et al.  Supervisory control for opacity of discrete event systems , 2011, 2011 49th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton).

[13]  Majed Ben-Kalefa,et al.  Opaque superlanguages and sublanguages in discrete event systems , 2009, CDC.

[14]  Michael K. Reiter,et al.  Crowds: anonymity for Web transactions , 1998, TSEC.

[15]  Christos G. Cassandras,et al.  Introduction to Discrete Event Systems , 1999, The Kluwer International Series on Discrete Event Dynamic Systems.

[16]  David Chaum,et al.  The dining cryptographers problem: Unconditional sender and recipient untraceability , 1988, Journal of Cryptology.

[17]  Feng Lin,et al.  Detectability of discrete event systems with dynamic event observation , 2010, Syst. Control. Lett..

[18]  Christoforos N. Hadjicostis,et al.  Verification of Infinite-Step Opacity and Complexity Considerations , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[19]  A. Saboori,et al.  Verification of initial-state opacity in security applications of DES , 2008, 2008 9th International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems.

[20]  Christoforos N. Hadjicostis,et al.  Notions of security and opacity in discrete event systems , 2007, 2007 46th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[21]  P. Darondeau,et al.  Opacity enforcing control synthesis , 2008, 2008 9th International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems.

[22]  Feng Lin,et al.  Online Sensor Activation for Detectability of Discrete Event Systems , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.

[23]  Hervé Marchand,et al.  Synthesis of opaque systems with static and dynamic masks , 2012, Formal Methods Syst. Des..

[24]  Philippe Darondeau,et al.  Supervisory Control for Opacity , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.