Attack Analysis and Resilient Control Design for Discrete-Time Distributed Multi-Agent Systems

This work analyzes the adverse effects of cyber-physical attacks on discrete-time distributed multi-agent systems, and proposes a mitigation approach for attacks on sensors and actuators. First, we show how an attack on a single node snowballs into a network-wide attack and even destabilizes the entire system. Next, to overcome the adversarial effects of attacks on sensors and actuators, a distributed adaptive attack compensator is designed by estimating the normal expected behavior of agents. The adaptive attack compensator is augmented with the controller and it is shown that the proposed controller achieves secure consensus in the presence of the attacks on sensors and actuators. No restrictive assumption on the number of agents under adversarial input is assumed. Moreover, it recovers compromised agents under actuator attacks and avoids propagation of attacks on sensors without discarding information from the compromised agents. Finally, numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the presented theoretical contributions on a network of Sentry autonomous underwater vehicles.