Professor Takashi Tanaka at ECE Spring 2025 Colloquium

Covert attack synthesis and mitigation over nonlinear dynamics

Hypothesis testing problems lie at the core of the interface between control and information theory. In this talk, we will highlight canonical CPS security challenges that require contributions from both the control and information theory communities.
We begin with a simple "GPS spoofing game" to analyze the competition between an attacker, who tries to covertly misguide a vehicle into an unsafe region, and a detector, who tries to identify the attack based on the vehicle’s observed trajectory. We derive the unique saddle point of the game. We also analyze the exponents of the type II error in the finite data length regime.
We then extend our analysis to nonlinear dynamics. We show that the zero-sum game between the attacker and the controller can be naturally formulated as the so-called minimax KL control problem. We derive a variational characterization of the saddle-point policies and derive Monte Carlo algorithms to compute them numerically.