Protecting Positive and Second-Order Systems against Undetectable Attacks

Undetectable attacks in security studies of cyber-physical systems render the measurements of the system equal to a possible physical response. In this paper, we investigate defense strategies against the undetectable single-attack for positive systems and second-order systems, which both can be reinterpreted in terms of graphs with nodes and edges, while the undetectable attack is added through one of the nodes. We show that an arbitrary placement of a sensor prevents undetectable single-attack for these classes of systems. It is worth emphasising that we do not need to measure at the corrupted node to prevent the undetectable single-attack, but can measure at any node. The defense strategy is of a low complexity and can be readily implemented.