Control theoretic techniques are utilised to develop automatic controllers that counteract robotic adversarial interventions in the operation of asynchronous sequential machines. The scenario centres on automatic protection against pre-programmed adversarial agents that attempt to subvert the operation of an asynchronous computing system. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of defensive controllers that automatically defeat such adversarial agents are derived. These conditions are stated in terms of skeleton matrices - matrices of zeros and ones obtained directly from the given description of the asynchronous sequential machine being protected. When defensive controllers exist, a procedure for their design is outlined.