Security in cyber-physical systems: Controller design against Known-Plaintext Attack

A substantial amount of research on the security of cyber-physical systems assumes that the physical system model is available to the adversary. In this paper, we argue that such an assumption can be relaxed, given that the adversary might still be able to identify the system model by observing the control input and sensory data from the system. In such a setup, the attack with the goal of identifying the system model using the knowledge of input-output data can be categorized as a Known-Plaintext Attack (KPA) in the information security literature. We first prove a necessary condition and a sufficient condition, under which the adversary can successfully identify the transfer function of the physical system. We then provide a low-rank controller design which renders the system unidentifiable to the adversary, while trading off the LQG performance.