Resilient Monitoring and Control Systems: Design, Analysis, and Performance Evaluation

Critical infrastructure systems (i.e., power plants, power grids, chemical plants, etc.) and their sensor networks are vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks. Cyber-attacks refer to the malicious manipulation of the sensor data, while physical attacks refer to the intentional damage of the plant components, by an adversary. The goal of this dissertation is to develop monitoring and control systems, which are resilient to these attacks.

We term the monitoring system as resilient if it provides the least uncertain (in terms of the minimum entropy) process variable estimates and plant condition assessment. The control system is termed resilient if it identifies the actuators under attack and generates the best possible control signals (in terms of the largest probability of maintaining the process variables in the desired range).

In this dissertation, we develop methods for the design and analysis of resilient monitoring and control systems and apply them to a model of a power plant. The efficacy of the resulting system is verified under various cyber-physical attack scenarios.