PRECISE Seminar: Robustness of Attack-resilient State Estimators

PRECISE Seminar: Robustness of Attack-resilient State Estimators
Fri, March 28, 2014 @ 1:30pm EDT
University of Pennsylvania
Levine Hall - Room 315
3330 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Speaker
Miroslav Pajic
Duke University
Abstract

(Joint work with Konstantinos Gatsis)

The interaction between information technology and physical world makes Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) vulnerable to malicious attacks beyond the standard cyber attacks. This has motivated the need for attack-resilient state estimation. Yet, the existing state-estimators are based on the non-realistic assumption that the exact system model is known. Consequently, in this work we present a method for state estimation in presence of attacks, for systems with noise and modeling errors. When the estimated states are used by a state-based feedback controller, we show that the attacker cannot destabilize the system by exploiting the difference between the model used for the state estimation and the real physical dynamics of the system. Furthermore, we describe how implementation issues such as jitter, latency and synchronization errors can be mapped into parameters of the state estimation procedure that describe modeling errors, and provide a bound on the state-estimation error caused by modeling errors. This enables mapping control performance requirements into real-time (i.e., timing related) specifications imposed on the underlying platform. Finally, we illustrate and experimentally evaluate this approach on an unmanned ground vehicle case-study. 

Speaker Bio

Miroslav Pajic is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering and PRECISE Center (Penn Research in Embedded Computing and Integrated System) at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and 2010, and the M.S. and Dipl. Ing. degrees from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 2007 and 2003, respectively. His research interests focus on the design and analysis of cyber-physical systems and in particular real-time and embedded systems, distributed/networked control system, and high-confidence medical device systems. Dr. Pajic received various awards including the ACM SIGBED Frank Anger Memorial Award, the Joseph and Rosaline Wolf Award for Best Dissertation in Electrical and Systems Engineering from Penn Engineering, the Best Student Paper Award at the 2012 IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), and Honeywell User Group Wireless Innovation Award.