Adversarial Attacks to Direct Data-driven Control for Destabilization

Abstract: This study investigates the vulnerability of direct data-driven control to adversarial attacks in the form of a small but sophisticated perturbation added to the original data. The directed gradient sign method (DGSM) is developed as a specific attack method, based on the fast gradient sign method (FGSM), which has originally been considered in image classification. DGSM uses the gradient of the eigenvalues of the resulting closed-loop system and crafts a perturbation in the direction where the system becomes less stable. It is demonstrated that the system can be destabilized by the attack, even if the original closed-loop system with the clean data has a large margin of stability. To increase the robustness against the attack, regularization methods that have been developed to deal with random disturbances are considered. Their effectiveness is evaluated by numerical experiments using an inverted pendulum model.