  This work presents a rigorous analysis of the adverse effects of
cyber-physical attacks on the performance of multi-agent consensus with
event-triggered control protocols. It is shown how a strategic malicious attack
on sensors and actuators can deceive the triggering condition of both
state-based event-triggered mechanism and combinational state-based
event-triggered mechanism, which are commonplace and widely used in the
literature. More precisely, it is first shown that a deception attack in the
case of combinational state-based event-triggered mechanism can result in a
non-triggering misbehavior, in the sense that the compromised agent does not
trigger any event and consequently results in partial feedback disconnectivity
by preventing information from reaching the local neighbors of the compromised
agent. This indicates that the combinational state-based event-triggered
mechanism can be leveraged by the attacker to harm the network connectivity by
rendering the recent data unavailable to agents. It is then shown that the
deception attack in the case of state-based event-triggered mechanism can
result in a continuous-triggering misbehavior in the sense that the
event-triggered mechanism continuously generates triggering events resulting in
undesirable phenomenon of Zeno behavior. Finally, numerical simulations are
presented to illustrate the theoretical findings.
