Encrypted Finite-Horizon Energy-to-Peak State Estimation for Time-Varying Systems Under Eavesdropping Attacks: Tackling Secrecy Capacity

This paper is concerned with the problem of finite-horizon energy-to-peak state estimation for a class of networked linear time-varying systems. Due to the inherent vulnerability of network-based communication, the measurement signals transmitted over a communication network might be intercepted by potential eavesdroppers. To avoid information leakage, by resorting to an artificial-noise-assisted method, we develop a novel encryption-decryption scheme to ensure that the transmitted signal is composed of the raw measurement and an artificial-noise term. A special evaluation index named secrecy capacity is employed to assess the information security of signal transmissions under the developed encryption-decryption scheme. The purpose of the addressed problem is to design an encryption-decryption scheme and a state estimator such that: 1) the desired secrecy capacity is ensured; and 2) the required finite-horizon l₂-l_ performance is achieved. Sufficient conditions are established on the existence of the encryption-decryption mechanism and the finite-horizon state estimator. Finally, simulation results are proposed to show the effectiveness of our proposed encryption-decryption-based state estimation scheme.