This paper presents a secure safety filter design for nonlinear systems under sensor spoofing attacks. Existing approaches primarily focus on linear systems which limits their applications in real-world scenarios. In this work, we extend these results to nonlinear systems in a principled way. We introduce exact observability maps that abstract specific state estimation algorithms and extend them to a secure version capable of handling sensor attacks. Our generalization also applies to the relaxed observability case, with slightly relaxed guarantees. More importantly, we propose a secure safety filter design in both exact and relaxed cases, which incorporates secure state estimation and a control barrier function-enabled safety filter. The proposed approach provides theoretical safety guarantees for nonlinear systems in the presence of sensor attacks. We numerically validate our analysis on a unicycle vehicle equipped with redundant yet partly compromised sensors.
@article{arxiv.2505.06842,
title = {Secure Safety Filter Design for Sampled-data Nonlinear Systems under Sensor Spoofing Attacks},
author = {Xiao Tan and Pio Ong and Paulo Tabuada and Aaron D. Ames},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.06842},
year = {2025}
}