Compositional and Abstraction-Based Approach for Synthesis of Edit Functions for Opacity Enforcement

Journal article, 2019

This article develops a novel compositional and abstraction-based approach to synthesize edit functions for opacity enforcement in modular discrete event systems. Edit functions alter the output of the system by erasing or inserting events in order to obfuscate the outside intruder, whose goal is to infer the secrets of the system from its observation. We synthesize edit functions to solve the opacity enforcement problem in a modular setting, which significantly reduces the computational complexity compared with the monolithic approach. Two abstraction methods called opaque observation equivalence and opaque bisimulation are first employed to abstract the individual components of the modular system and their observers. Subsequently, we propose a method to transform the synthesis of edit functions to the calculation of modular supremal nonblocking supervisors. We show that the edit functions synthesized in this manner correctly solve the opacity enforcement problem.