2023/11/09 by Philipp Binfet, Binfet, Philipp, Nils Schlüter +3
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Control Systems Optimization #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Electrical engineering #Formal Methods in Verification #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.05215
openalex publication_date 2023/11/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Control related data, such as system states and inputs or controller specifications, is often sensitive. Meanwhile, the increasing connectivity of cloud-based or networked control results in vast amounts of such data, which poses a privacy threat, especially when evaluation on external platforms is considered. In this context, a cipher based on a random affine transformation gained attention, which is supposed to enable privacy-preserving evaluations of quadratic programs (QPs) with little computational overhead compared to other methods. This paper deals with the security of such randomly transformed QPs in the context of model predictive control (MPC). In particular, we show how to construct attacks against this cipher and thereby underpin concerns regarding its security in a practical setting. To this end, we exploit invariants under the transformations and common specifications of MPC-related QPs. Our numerical examples then illustrate that these two ingredients suffice to extract information from ciphertexts.