Encryption-Decryption-Based State Estimation With Multirate Measurements Against Eavesdroppers: A Recursive Minimum-Variance Approach

This article is concerned with the secure state estimation problem for a networked system with multirate measurements. The measurement data are transmitted to the estimator over a communication network, where an eavesdropper could intercept the transmitted information and generate the state estimates based on the overheard signals. In order to protect the privacy of the system state from information leakage, a novel encryptor is proposed to encrypt the measurement signals into codewords before being transmitted, and a decryptor is then adopted at the user side to decrypt the received codewords into the desired measurement signals, based on which a recursive state estimator is developed whose parameter is calculated by solving several coupled difference equations. Here, the secret key for decryption is available to the user but is unknown to the eavesdropper. The encryptor and the estimator are codesigned such that 1) at the user side, the estimation error covariance has an upper bound that is subsequently minimized in the sense of the matrix trace, where the uniform boundedness of the error covariance is also examined; and 2) at the eavesdropper side, the corresponding state estimation error is divergent. Two simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our developed secure state estimation scheme.