An adaptive sliding mode observer for linear systems under malicious attack

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed extensive research activities in the development of control law architectures for cyber-physical systems consisting of sensing, computing and communication modules working together to control physical systems. One of the main challenges in cyber-physical systems is the vulnerability to adversarial attacks. As the important module in cyber physical systems, sensor measurements are prone to malicious attacks due to the use of open computation and communication architectures. This paper proposes an adaptive sliding mode observer for state estimation of systems subjected to adversarial attacks. The novelty of the method considered here lies in the use of the equivalent control concept to explicitly reconstruct attack signals and consequently the system state. A design procedure is described and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.