Optimal Communication Strategies in Networked Cyber-Physical Systems with Adversarial Elements

This paper studies optimal communication and coordination strategies in cyber-physical systems for both defender and attacker within a game-theoretic framework. We model the communication network of a cyber-physical system as a sensor network which involves one single Gaussian source observed by many sensors, subject to additive independent Gaussian observation noises. The sensors communicate with the estimator over a coherent Gaussian multiple access channel. The aim of the receiver is to reconstruct the underlying source with minimum mean squared error. The scenario of interest here is one where some of the sensors are captured by the attacker and they act as the adversary (jammer): they strive to maximize distortion. The receiver (estimator) knows the captured sensors but still cannot simply ignore them due to the multiple access channel, i.e., the outputs of all sensors are summed to generate the estimator input. We show that the ability of transmitter sensors to secretly agree on a random event, that is "coordination", plays a key role in the analysis...