Attack-resilient corrective control of nondeterministic asynchronous sequential machines and its application to a space-borne digital system

This article addresses a novel attack-resilient corrective control scheme for nondeterministic input/state asynchronous sequential machines (ASMs) vulnerable to actuator attacks. The considered actuator attack causes ASMs to undergo unauthorized state transitions in both fundamental and non-fundamental mode. In comparison with the case of deterministic ASMs, different control objectives and reachability conditions should be presented to fulfill complete attack detection and recovery. In the framework of corrective control theory with the state-burst feedback, we present the existence condition and design procedure for an attack-resilient corrective controller which harnesses nondeterminism in the machine's operation. To demonstrate the superiority and applicability of the proposed control strategy, hardware experiments on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuits implementing a space-borne digital system are conducted and convincing experimental verifications are provided.