English

On Connections between Opacity and Security in Linear Systems

Systems and Control 2022-06-14 v1 Formal Languages and Automata Theory Systems and Control

Abstract

Opacity and attack detectability are important properties for any system as they allow the states to remain private and malicious attacks to be detected, respectively. In this paper, we show that a fundamental trade-off exists between these properties for a linear dynamical system, in the sense that if an opaque system is subjected to attacks, all attacks cannot be detected. We first characterize the opacity conditions for the system in terms of its weakly unobservable subspace (WUS) and show that the number of opaque states is proportional to the size of the WUS. Further, we establish conditions under which increasing the opaque sets also increases the set of undetectable attacks. This highlights a fundamental trade-off between security and privacy. We demonstrate application of our results on a remotely controlled automotive system.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.06074,
  title  = {On Connections between Opacity and Security in Linear Systems},
  author = {Varkey M. John and Vaibhav Katewa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.06074},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures. Submitted for publication to the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:48:45.065Z