Secure Your Intention: On Notions of Pre-Opacity in Discrete-Event Systems

This article investigates an important inform- ation-flow security property called opacity in partially-observed discrete-event systems. We consider the presence of a passive intruder (eavesdropper) that knows the dynamic model of the system and can use the generated information flow to infer some “secret” of the system. A system is said to be opaque if it always holds the plausible deniability for its secret. Existing notions of opacity only consider secret either as currently visiting some secret states or as having visited some secret states in the past. In this article, we investigate information-flow security from a new angle by considering the secret of the system as the
intention
to execute some particular behavior of importance in the future. To this end, we propose a new class of opacity called
pre-opacity
that characterizes whether or not the intruder can predict the visit of secret states a certain number of steps ahead before the system actually does so. Depending the prediction task of the intruder, we propose two specific kinds of pre-opacity called
$K$-step instant pre-opacity
and
$K$-step trajectory pre-opacity
to specify this concept. For each notion of pre-opacity, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition as well as an effective verification algorithm. The complexity for the verification of pre-opacity is exponential in the size of the system as we show that pre-opacity is inherently PSPACE-hard. Finally, we generalize our setting to the case where the secret intention of the system is modeled as executing a particular sequence of events rather than visiting a secret state.