On the (non-)resilience of encrypted controllers to covert attacks

--> Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2605.14230 (cs) [Submitted on 14 May 2026] Title: On the (non-)resilience of encrypted controllers to covert attacks Authors: Philipp Binfet , Janis Adamek , Moritz Schulze Darup View a PDF of the paper titled On the (non-)resilience of encrypted controllers to covert attacks, by Philipp Binfet and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: The security of networked control systems (NCS) is receiving increasing attention from both cyber-security and system-theoretic perspectives. The former focuses on classical IT security goals such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability of process data, while the latter investigates tailored attacks (and detection schemes), including covert and zero-dynamics attacks. Confidentiality in control systems can, for instance, be achieved by securely outsourcing the evaluation of the controller to third-party platforms, such as cloud services. The underlying technology enabling such secure computation often is homomorphic encryption (HE). Recent works in encrypted control have proposed modifications to underlying HE schemes to achieve not only confidentiality but also resilience to certain types of integrity attacks. While extensions in this direction are desirable in principle, we show that the integrity problem in encrypted control cannot be solved by public-key HE schemes alone due to their inherent malleability. In other words, the same homomorphisms that enable encrypted control % in the first place can be leveraged not only constructively but also destructively. More precisely, we demonstrate that NCS are vulnerable to covert attacks, even when encrypted control is employed. Remarkably, this remains possible without knowledge of an unencrypted model. Yet, resilience to such attacks can still be achieved through complementary techniques. We present an approach based on verifiable computation that integrates with modern homomorphic cryptosystems and is asymptotically secure while incurring no communication overhead. Comments: Extended version of a paper presented at the IFAC World Congress 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) ; Systems and Control (eess.SY) Cite as: arXiv:2605.14230 [cs.CR] (or arXiv:2605.14230v1 [cs.CR] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.14230 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Philipp Binfet [ view email ] [v1] Thu, 14 May 2026 00:49:46 UTC (251 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled On the (non-)resilience of encrypted controllers to covert attacks, by Philipp Binfet and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.SY eess eess.SY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? )