How to Secure Distributed Filters Under Sensor Attacks

In this article, we study how to secure distributed filters for linear time-invariant systems with bounded noise under false-data injection attacks. A malicious attacker is able to arbitrarily manipulate the observations for a time-varying and unknown subset of the sensors. We first propose a recursive distributed filter consisting of two steps at each update. The first step employs a saturation-like scheme, which gives a small gain if the innovation is large corresponding to a potential attack. The second step is a consensus operation of state estimates among neighboring sensors. We prove the estimation error is upper bounded if the filter parameters satisfy a condition. We further analyze the feasibility of the condition and connect it to sparse observability in the centralized case. When the attacked sensor set is known to be time-invariant, the secured filter is modified by adding an online local attack detector. The detector is able to identify the attacked sensors whose observation innovations are larger than the detection thresholds. Also, with more attacked sensors being detected, the thresholds will adaptively adjust to reduce the space of the stealthy attack signals. The resilience of the secured filter with detection is verified by an explicit relationship between the upper bound of the estimation error and the number of detected attacked sensors. Moreover, for the noise-free case, we prove that the state estimate of each sensor asymptotically converges to the system state under certain conditions. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the developed results.