Encrypted and Trust-Aware Periodic Event-Triggered Fault-Tolerant Control for Cyber--Physical Systems Under Malicious Attacks

Abstract

Cyber–physical systems (CPSs) rely on sensing, computation, and communication to support distributed coordination in industrial and integrated energy applications, but this dependence also exposes them to malicious data manipulation. This article proposes an encrypted and trust-aware periodic event-triggered fault-tolerant control (FTC) framework for distributed CPS under sustained composite data injection attacks. A trust-aware residual evaluation mechanism is developed to quantify the reliability of neighboring data by comparing received information with predictive states. When unreliable data are detected, a zero-order hold (ZOH)-based recovery strategy reconstructs neighboring states from the latest safe information, preventing compromised data from directly entering the consensus protocol. Meanwhile, a decaying Laplace encryption mechanism is embedded into the periodic event-triggered transmission process to protect transmitted state information while preserving asymptotic consensus accuracy. Lyapunov analysis proves the mean-square asymptotic consensus of the closed-loop CPS under bounded composite attacks, and the periodic triggering structure provides a positive lower bound on the interevent time. Hardware-in-the-loop simulations on a 12-node cyber–physical integrated energy test system show that the proposed method reduces attack-induced incremental-cost fluctuations, restores energy mismatch close to zero, and achieves more stable coordination than conventional consensus and existing event-triggered strategies.