A bio-inspired approach to secure networked control systems against adversarial delays

In recent years, networked control systems (NCS) have attracted considerable attention due to their potential in addressing the challenges of modern control problems in various domains. Developing NCS to automate and control physical processes in such scenarios are often met with a multitude of engineering challenges both at the networks and control aspects of the system design. Along with data security, securing NCS against possible adversarial activities is critical to ensure system stability and operator safety. In this work, we leverage a framework from evolutionary biology called the Lotka-Volterra (L-V) competition model to analyze the impact of time-delays in an NCS compromised by an adversary. Our analysis reveals that the additional-time delays introduced by the adversary negatively impact NCS stability. We further propose a fuzzy logic based defense mechanism to compensate for the time-delays introduced by the adversary. Evaluation in MATLAB/Simulink based TRUETIME simulation test-bed demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in securing the NCS against adversarial time delays.