Distributed Secure State Estimation Using Diffusion Kalman Filters and Reachability Analysis

Amr Alanwar, Hazem Said, Matthias Althoff

Abstract: The tight coupling of information technology with physical sensing and actuation in cyber-physical systems (CPS) has given rise to new security vulnerabilities and attacks with potentially life-threatening consequences. These attacks are designed to transfer the physical system into unstable and insecure states by providing corrupted sensor readings. In this work, we present an approach for distributed secure linear state estimation in the presence of modeling and measurement noise between a network of nodes with pairwise measurements. We provide security against measurement attacks and simplify the traditional distributed secure state estimation problem. Reachability analysis is utilized to establish a security layer providing secure estimate shares for the distributed diffusion Kalman filter. Furthermore, we consider not only attacks on the link level but also on the sensor level. The proposed combined filter protects against measurement and diffusion attacks without requiring specialized hardware or cryptographic techniques. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by a localization example of a rotating target.