Networked control systems under cyber attacks with applications to power networks

Networked control systems under certain cyber attacks are analyzed. The communication network of these control systems make them vulnerable to attacks from malicious outsiders. Our work deals with two types of attacks: attacks on the network nodes and attacks on the communication between the nodes. We propose a distributed scheme to detect and isolate the attacks using observers. Furthermore, we discuss how to reduce the number of observer nodes while maintaining the coverage of the entire network. The results are applied to two classes of networked control systems: a network running the consensus protocol and a power network defined by the linearized swing equation. Sufficient conditions for the existence of the proposed attack detection scheme are provided for the first class of systems. For the second class, we provide a necessary condition for the existence of the proposed detection scheme.