Strategic Topology Switching for Security-Part I: Consensus & Switching Times
For multi-agent systems security, this work provides a method to detect stealthy attacks while maintaining consensus, but it is incremental as it builds on existing switched systems theory.
This paper addresses the problem of detecting zero-dynamics attacks in second-order multi-agent systems by strategically switching network topologies. It proposes a decentralized time-dependent switching algorithm that achieves consensus using only relative position measurements, with no constraints on coupling weights.
In this two-part paper, we consider strategic topology switching for the second-order multi-agent systems under a special class of stealthy attacks, namely the "zero-dynamics" attack (ZDA). The main mathematical tool proposed here is to strategically switch the network topology to detect a possible ZDA. However, it is not clear a priori that such a switching strategy still yields consensus in this switched system, in the normal (un-attacked) operation mode. In Part I, we propose a strategy on the switching times that enables the topology-switching algorithm proposed in Part II to reach the second-order consensus in the absence of a ZDA. Utilizing the theory of stable switched linear systems with unstable subsystems, we characterize sufficient conditions for the dwell time of topology-switching signal to reach consensus. Building on this characterization, we then propose a decentralized time-dependent topology-switching algorithm. The proposed algorithm, used in conjunction with a simplified control protocol, achieves consensus while providing substantial advantages over other control approaches: it relies only on the relative position measurements (without any requirement for velocity measurements); and it does not impose any constraint on the magnitudes of coupling weights. We finally demonstrate our theoretical findings via the numerical simulation results.