Synthesis of State-Attack Strategies for Anonymity and Opacity Violation in Discrete Event Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Xiaoyan, Hadjicostis, Christoforos N.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Xiaoyan
Hadjicostis, Christoforos N.
author_facet Li, Xiaoyan
Hadjicostis, Christoforos N.
contents Attacks, including the manipulation of sensor readings and the modification of actuator commands, pose a significant challenge to the security and privacy of automated systems. This paper considers discrete event systems that can be modeled with nondeterministic finite state automata that are susceptible to state attacks. A state attack allows an intruder to learn whether or not the current state of a system falls into certain subsets of states. The intruder has a limited total number of state attacks at its disposal, but can launch state attacks at arbitrary instants of its choosing. We are interested on violations of current-state anonymity (resp. opacity), i.e., situations where the intruder, based on the sequence of observations generated by the system and the outcome of any performed state attacks, can ascertain the exact current state of the system (resp. that the current state of the system definitely resides in a subset of secret states). When the system violates current-state anonymity (resp. opacity) under a bounded number of state attacks, a subsequent question is whether the intruder can design an attack strategy such that anonymity-violating (resp. opacity-violating) situations will always be reached. In this latter case, we also design an attack strategy that guarantees that the system will reach a violating situation regardless of system actions. We provide pertinent complexity analysis of the corresponding verification algorithms and examples to illustrate the proposed methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synthesis of State-Attack Strategies for Anonymity and Opacity Violation in Discrete Event Systems
Li, Xiaoyan
Hadjicostis, Christoforos N.
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Attacks, including the manipulation of sensor readings and the modification of actuator commands, pose a significant challenge to the security and privacy of automated systems. This paper considers discrete event systems that can be modeled with nondeterministic finite state automata that are susceptible to state attacks. A state attack allows an intruder to learn whether or not the current state of a system falls into certain subsets of states. The intruder has a limited total number of state attacks at its disposal, but can launch state attacks at arbitrary instants of its choosing. We are interested on violations of current-state anonymity (resp. opacity), i.e., situations where the intruder, based on the sequence of observations generated by the system and the outcome of any performed state attacks, can ascertain the exact current state of the system (resp. that the current state of the system definitely resides in a subset of secret states). When the system violates current-state anonymity (resp. opacity) under a bounded number of state attacks, a subsequent question is whether the intruder can design an attack strategy such that anonymity-violating (resp. opacity-violating) situations will always be reached. In this latter case, we also design an attack strategy that guarantees that the system will reach a violating situation regardless of system actions. We provide pertinent complexity analysis of the corresponding verification algorithms and examples to illustrate the proposed methods.
title Synthesis of State-Attack Strategies for Anonymity and Opacity Violation in Discrete Event Systems
topic Formal Languages and Automata Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22657