Synthesis of Optimal Stealthy Attacks Against Diagnosability in Labeled Petri Nets

Ruotian Liu; Agostino Marcello Mangini; Maria Pia Fanti

doi:10.1109/JAS.2025.125156

Volume 12 Issue 8

Aug. 2025

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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R. Liu, A. Mangini, and M. Fanti, “Synthesis of optimal stealthy attacks against diagnosability in labeled Petri nets,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 12, no. 8, pp. 1661–1672, Aug. 2025. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125156

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R. Liu, A. Mangini, and M. Fanti, “Synthesis of optimal stealthy attacks against diagnosability in labeled Petri nets,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 12, no. 8, pp. 1661–1672, Aug. 2025. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125156

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Synthesis of Optimal Stealthy Attacks Against Diagnosability in Labeled Petri Nets

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125156

Funds: This work was supported in part by the IN2CCAM Project that had received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and Innovation Programme (101076791). This manuscript reflects only the authors’ views and opinions, neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be considered responsible for them

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Author Bio:
Ruotian Liu (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. degree in automation from Xidian University in 2015, and M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in automation from Aix-Marseille University, France, in 2018 and 2021, respectively. In 2022, he joined Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy, where he is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering. He is serving as a Guest Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. His research interests include control theory in discrete event systems and hybrid systems, diagnosability/opacity analysis, and networked security

Agostino Marcello Mangini (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Laurea degree in electronics engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy, in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He has been a Visiting Scholar with the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy. He has authored or coauthored over 140 printed publications. His current research interests include modeling, simulation, control of discrete-event systems, Petri nets, deep reinforcement learning, supply chains and urban traffic networks, distribution, and internal logistics. He was on the program committees of the 2007–2023 IEEE International SMC Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. He was on the Editorial Board of the 2017–2023 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. Moreover, he was the Publication Chair of the 2017 IEEE SOLI and the 2019 IEEE SMC conferences, the Workshop Co-Chair of the 2023 IEEE SMC conference, the Workshop and Tutorial Chair of the 2023 IEEE CASE Conference, and the Special Session Chair of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Automation in Manufacturing, Transportation and Logistics (iCaMaL2023). He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automation and Science and Engineering and IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Magazine

Maria Pia Fanti (Fellow, IEEE) received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1983. She was a visiting researcher at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, USA, in 1999. Since 1983, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the Polytechnic of Bari, Italy, where she is currently a Full Professor of system and control engineering and Chair of the Laboratory of Automation and Control. Her research interests include management and modeling of complex systems, such as intelligent transportation, logistics and manufacturing systems; discrete event systems; Petri nets; and fault detection. Prof. Fanti has published more than 370 papers and two textbooks on her research topics.She is a Senior Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems and the IEEE Trans. on Intelligent Vehicles. She was Member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, and of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automaton Society, founder and chair of the Technical Committee on Automation in Logistics of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Prof. Fanti was general chair, program chair and member of the organizing committee of a large number of international conferences in particular she was General Chair of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics and the 2019 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Conference
Corresponding author: Maria Pia Fanti, e-mail: mariapia.fanti@poliba.it
Received Date: 2024-11-22
Accepted Date: 2024-12-27

Available Online: 2025-05-22

Abstract

Abstract

This paper addresses the diagnosability analysis problem under external malicious attacks of a networked discrete event system modeled by labeled Petri net. In particular, we focus on a stealthy replacement attack to alter or corrupt the observation of the system, in which the transition labels are replaced by others or empty string, and its attack stealthiness requires that the corrupted observations should be contained in the behavior of system. The aim of this work is, from an attacker viewpoint, to design a stealthy replacement attack for violating the diagnosability of system. To this end, we first build a new structure, called complete unfolded verifier, with the notion of a predefined elementary unsound path that leads to the violation of diagnosability, which is used to enumerate all the potential attacked paths to be transformed into elementary unsound ones. Then an optimal attack synthesis problem in terms of minimum energy cost is formulated by determining whether an elementary unsound path is generated via solving a set of integer nonlinear programming problems. Finally, we show that the nonlinear programming problems can be transformed into integer linear programming problems by introducing additional linear constraints. Examples are used to illustrate the proposed attack strategy.
- Cyber attack,
- diagnosability,
- discrete event system (DES),
- labeled Petri net (LPN),
- optimization

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References(49)

References

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Synthesis of Optimal Stealthy Attacks Against Diagnosability in Labeled Petri Nets

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