Securing Mobile Robotic Networks Against Replacement Attack

The security of mobile robotic networks (MRNs) has been an active research topic in recent years. This article aims to secure the ubiquitous formation control of MRNs against the replacement attack, where an external robot can replace a formation robot by compromising the communication and physically interfering with the victim simultaneously. To counter this advanced attack, the novel idea of this work is to leverage the physical proximity of the formation shape and the interaction topology among robots for defense design. First, from the physical proximity perspective, we propose the convex neighbor polygon (CNP) to capture the geometric characteristic of the formation robots, and design a CNP-based security mechanism for the robots during the replacement attack. Then, from the interaction perspective, we introduce the indirect controllability to characterize the possibility that the attacker leverages the interaction between robots to deactivate the CNP mechanism, and establish the conditions regarding the topology structure and the attack input to counter the replacement. Finally, based on the obtained conditions, we demonstrate how to design the initiatory topology among the formation robots to enhance the defense performance. Comparative simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.