Keeping Secrets: Realizing the Potential of Decentralized Discrete-Event Systems

保守秘密：实现去中心化离散事件系统的潜力

• 批准号: RGPIN-2020-04279
• 负责人: Rudie, Karen
• 金额: $ 3.35万
• 依托单位: Queen's University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2020-01-01 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=716808
• 关键词: Keeping; Secrets; Realizing; Potential; Decentralized

The proposed research program will develop decentralized discrete-event systems (DES) to support autonomous vehicles (AV), smart cities, power grids and other interconnected networks of communicating agents by ensuring security and opacity. Power and electricity generation is becoming decentralized and self-driving cars are by nature decentralized. Decentralization requires the communication of information (such as event occurrences) between disparate agents (e.g., AVs, power generators, or computers), which opens a system to possible security breaches or hostile maneuvering. The proposed program will develop new techniques for maintaining system opacity; in DES, opacity means that sequences of events or states that have been designated as secret cannot be distinguished from other, non-secret event sequences or states. If a system is opaque, hostile agents will not have information critical to mounting an attack on the system. For agents that are distributed across a system to work together to ensure security, information or knowledge that one agent lacks must be supplied (in this case, communicated) by another agent with different, and complementary, information. While prior work in DES has examined communication between agents to enact control, existing research has not focused on communication to ensure opacity. The problem with distributed communication is that agents must find ways to help other agents perform tasks while ensuring that an adversary does not learn enough about the system to discern secret information. Deriving communication strategies requires understanding what information each agent possesses. Just as people make decisions based not only on their direct observations but also on what they know about what other people know, so too should automated agents make decisions based on their knowledge of other agents. Consequently, the proposed research will also develop a mathematical-logic model for DES that captures the knowledge that agents have about the system and about other agents. Mathematical models of knowledge have been used, to advantage, to model problems in computer science but have yet to be significantly exploited in control systems or DES. As an example, to make “smart cars” truly smart we need to imbue these unmanned vehicles with the capability to reason about the knowledge that other vehicles have so that vehicles can independently determine what information to send and when to send it in a way that ensures that the system is impervious to being commandeered by unauthorized agents. My research program will train 4 PhD and 3 MASc students in DES modeling, algorithm design, and software development and will enable HQP to test and refine their research on real networks of interconnected computers and autonomous vehicles. My program will enable Canada to meet societal demands for ensuring that as we move to more distributed, more intelligent and more autonomous systems, we do not sacrifice security and safety.

拟议的研究计划将开发分散的离散事件系统（DES），以通过确保安全性和不透明性来支持自动驾驶汽车（AV），智能城市，电网和其他互连的通信代理网络。电力和发电正在变得分散，自动驾驶汽车本质上是分散的。去中心化需要在不同的代理（例如，自动驾驶汽车、发电机或计算机），这会使系统面临可能的安全漏洞或敌对机动。拟议的计划将开发新的技术来保持系统的不透明性;在DES中，不透明性意味着被指定为秘密的事件或状态的序列不能与其他非秘密的事件序列或状态区分开来。如果一个系统是不透明的，那么敌对代理就不会拥有对系统发动攻击至关重要的信息。为了让分布在系统中的代理共同工作以确保安全，一个代理缺乏的信息或知识必须由另一个代理提供（在这种情况下，通信）不同的和互补的信息。虽然以前的工作在DES检查代理之间的通信，制定控制，现有的研究并没有集中在通信，以确保不透明性。分布式通信的问题在于，代理必须找到帮助其他代理执行任务的方法，同时确保对手对系统的了解不足以识别秘密信息。 导出通信策略需要了解每个代理拥有哪些信息。就像人们不仅根据他们的直接观察，而且根据他们对其他人所知道的情况做出决策一样，自动代理也应该根据他们对其他代理的了解做出决策。因此，拟议中的研究还将开发一个数学逻辑模型DES，捕获的知识，代理人对系统和其他代理。知识的数学模型已经被用来，有利的是，在计算机科学中建模的问题，但尚未显着利用控制系统或DES。举个例子，为了让“智能汽车”真正智能，我们需要让这些无人驾驶汽车具备推理其他汽车所拥有的知识的能力，这样汽车就可以独立地确定发送什么信息以及何时发送信息，从而确保系统不会被未经授权的代理人征用。 我的研究项目将培训4名博士和3名硕士学生DES建模，算法设计和软件开发，并将使HQP能够测试和完善他们在互联计算机和自动驾驶汽车的真实的网络上的研究。我的计划将使加拿大能够满足社会需求，以确保当我们转向更分布式，更智能和更自主的系统时，我们不会牺牲安全和安全。