Abstract
State awareness for a control system is the accurate knowledge of the internal states of the system realization. To maintain stable operation, a controller requires a certain degree of state awareness. By definition, a cyber-attacker decreases the state awareness by modifying or removing the information available to the operator and control system. By doing so, the attacker can directly cause damage to the physical system through the control system, or indirectly by causing the operator to react in a damaging manner to the false information. In a number of recent papers, detection and mitigation strategies have been proposed that assume state awareness. The goal of the attacker to reduce or remove state awareness makes this assumption invalid for most situations. One of the central problems of resilient control is developing methods to retain sufficient state awareness to continue operation during a cyberattack. In this paper, we will define state awareness, discuss the consequences of loss of state awareness, and some potential research directions for maintaining state awareness.
