A Unifying Decision-Making Framework to study secrecy in Discrete event systems

This paper deals with secrecy, i.e. how an information-flow property of system can be kept secret from observers. Recently, a discrete-event system based model has been developed to study secrecy. With such a model, secrecy preservation of a property is modeled as the impossibility for observers to determine whether executed event sequences belong or not to a given language. In the present paper, we adopt this model of secrecy and study it by using a Unifying Decision-Making Framework (UDMF) which has been recently developed. UDMF is a generic decision-making framework for discrete-event systems, which has been shown to generalize supervisory control, diagnosis and prognosis of discrete-event systems, which are thus particular instances of UDMF. Following the same idea, we express preservation of secrecy as a particular case of UDMF. We take advantage of results of UDMF to obtain results in secrecy preservation.