The mass integration and deployment of intelligent technologies within critical commercial, industrial and public environments have a significant impact on business operations and society as a whole. Though integration of these critical intelligent technologies pose serious embedded security challenges for technology manufacturers which are required to be systematically approached, in-line with international security regulations. This paper establish security foundation for such intelligent technologies by deriving embedded security requirements to realise the core security functions laid out by international security authorities, and proposing microarchitectural characteristics to establish cyber resilience in embedded systems. To bridge the research gap between embedded and operational security domains, a detailed review of existing embedded security methods, microarchitectures and design practises is presented. The existing embedded security methods have been found ad-hoc, passive and strongly rely on building and maintaining trust. To the best of our knowledge to date, no existing embedded security microarchitecture or defence mechanism provides continuity of data stream or security once trust has broken. This functionality is critical for embedded technologies deployed in critical infrastructure to enhance and maintain security, and to gain evidence of the security breach to effectively evaluate, improve and deploy active response and mitigation strategies. To this end, the paper proposes three microarchitectural characteristics that shall be designed and integrated into embedded architectures to establish, maintain and improve cyber resilience in embedded systems for next-generation critical infrastructure.
This paper explores the essential areas of cybersecurity management for big data systems. Big data platform stems its complexity from being a collection of interrelated non-standardized systems that interact with each other to process large data-sets. This complexity increases the chances of overlooking critical cybersecurity management practices. The paper discusses various security management for each part of big data systems. This includes security measures, standards, and methodologies. The primary objective is to highlight the essential segments of security management that are expected to…
While connected vehicle (CV) applications have the potential to revolutionize traditional transportation system, cyber and physical attacks on them could be devastating. In this work, we propose an efficient dual cyber-physical blockchain framework to build trust and secure communication for CV applications. Our approach incorporates blockchain technology and physical sensing capabilities of vehicles to quickly react to attacks in a large-scale vehicular network, with low resource overhead. We explore the application of our framework to three CV applications, i.e., highway merging, intelligent…
Recently, cloud control systems have gained increasing attention from the research community as a solution to implement networked cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Such an architecture can reduce deployment and maintenance costs albeit at the expense of additional security and privacy concerns. In this paper, first, we discuss state-of-the-art security solutions for cloud control systems and their limitations. Then, we propose a novel control architecture based on Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). We show that such an approach can potentially address major security and privacy issues for clou…
We are not very good at measuring -- rigorously and quantitatively -- the cyber security of systems. Our ability to measure cyber resilience is even worse. And without measuring cyber resilience, we can neither improve it nor trust its efficacy. It is difficult to know if we are improving or degrading cyber resilience when we add another control, or a mix of controls, to harden the system. The only way to know is to specifically measure cyber resilience with and without a particular set of controls. What needs to be measured are temporal patterns of recovery and adaptation, and not time-indepe…
This report summarizes the discussions and findings of the 2017 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Workshop, IST-153, on Cyber Resilience, held in Munich, Germany, on 23-25 October 2017, at the University of Bundeswehr. Despite continual progress in managing risks in the cyber domain, anticipation and prevention of all possible attacks and malfunctions are not feasible for the current or future systems comprising the cyber infrastructure. Therefore, interest in cyber resilience (as opposed to merely risk-based approaches) is increasing rapidly, in literature and in practice. Unlike conc…
Given the rapid evolution of threats to cyber systems, new management approaches are needed that address risk across all interdependent domains (i.e., physical, information, cognitive, and social) of cyber systems. Further, the traditional approach of hardening of cyber systems against identified threats has proven to be impossible. Therefore, in the same way that biological systems develop immunity as a way to respond to infections and other attacks, so too must cyber systems adapt to ever-changing threats that continue to attack vital system functions, and to bounce back from the effects of …
The term "cyber resilience by design" is growing in popularity. Here, by cyber resilience we refer to the ability of the system to resist, minimize and mitigate a degradation caused by a successful cyber-attack on a system or network of computing and communicating devices. Some use the term "by design" when arguing that systems must be designed and implemented in a provable mission assurance fashion, with the system's intrinsic properties ensuring that a cyber-adversary is unable to cause a meaningful degradation. Others recommend that a system should include a built-in autonomous intelligent …
Several approaches have been used to assess the performance of cyberphysical systems and their exposure to various types of risks. Such assessments have become increasingly important as autonomous attackers ramp up the frequency, duration and intensity of threats while autonomous agents have the potential to respond to cyber-attacks with unprecedented speed and scale. However, most assessment approaches have limitations with respect to measuring cyber resilience, or the ability of systems to absorb, recover from, and adapt to cyberattacks. In this paper, we provide an overview of several commo…
Resilience is a feature that is gaining more and more attention in computer science and computer engineering. However, the definition of resilience for the cyber landscape, especially embedded systems, is not yet clear. This paper discusses definitions of different authors, years and different application areas the field of computer science/computer engineering. We identify the core statements that are more or less common to the majority of the definitions and based on this we give a holistic definition using attributes for (cyber-) resilience. In order to pave a way towards resilience-enginee…
Quantum Computing and Cybersecurity in Accounting and Finance: Current and Future Challenges and the Opportunities for Securing Accounting and Finance Systems in the Post-Quantum World
We identify quantitative characteristics of responses to cyber compromises that can be learned from repeatable, systematic experiments. We model a vehicle equipped with an autonomous cyber-defense system and which also has some inherent physical resilience features. When attacked by malware, this ensemble of cyber-physical features (i.e., "bonware") strives to resist and recover from the performance degradation caused by the malware's attack. We propose parsimonious continuous models, and develop stochastic models to aid in quantifying systems' resilience to cyber attacks.
Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by their ability to integrate the physical and information or cyber worlds. Their deployment in critical infrastructure have demonstrated a potential to transform the world. However, harnessing this potential is limited by their critical nature and the far reaching effects of cyber attacks on human, infrastructure and the environment. An attraction for cyber concerns in CPS rises from the process of sending information from sensors to actuators over the wireless communication medium, thereby widening the attack surface. Traditionally, CPS security…
Modern embedded and cyber-physical systems are ubiquitous. A large number of critical cyber-physical systems have real-time requirements (e.g., avionics, automobiles, power grids, manufacturing systems, industrial control systems, etc.). Recent developments and new functionality requires real-time embedded devices to be connected to the Internet. This gives rise to the real-time Internet-of-things (RT-IoT) that promises a better user experience through stronger connectivity and efficient use of next-generation embedded devices. However RT- IoT are also increasingly becoming targets for cyber-a…
The vulnerability of cyber-physical systems to cyber attack is well known, and the requirement to build cyber resilience into these systems has been firmly established. The key challenge this paper addresses is that maturing this discipline requires the development of techniques, tools, and processes for objectively, rigorously, and quantitatively measuring the attributes of cyber resilience. Researchers and program managers need to be able to determine if the implementation of a resilience solution actually increases the resilience of the system. In previous work, a table top exercise was con…
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) use computational resources to control physical process and provide critical services. For this reason, an attack in these systems may have dangerous consequences in the physical world. Hence, resilience is a fundamental property to ensure the safety of the people, the environment and the controlled physical process. In this paper, we present metrics to quantify the resilience level based on the design, structure, stability, and performance under the attack of a given CPS. The metrics provide reference points to evaluate whether the system is better prepared or not…
Cyber security and resilience are major challenges in our modern economies; this is why they are top priorities on the agenda of governments, security and defense forces, management of companies and organizations. Hence, the need of a deep understanding of cyber risks to improve resilience. We propose here an analysis of the database of the cyber complaints filed at the {\it Gendarmerie Nationale}. We perform this analysis with a new algorithm developed for non-negative asymmetric heavy-tailed data, which could become a handy tool in applied fields. This method gives a good estimation of the f…
Cyber Security scares are the main areas of demerits associated with the advent and widespread of internet technology. While the internet has improved life and business processes, the levels of security threats have been increasing proportionally. As such, the web and the related cyber systems have exposed the world to the state of continuous vigilance because of the existential threats of attacks. Criminals are in the constant state of attempting cybersecurity defense of various infrastructures and businesses. Airports are some of the areas where cybersecurity means a lot of things. The reaso…
Digitization and remote connectivity have enlarged the attack surface and made cyber systems more vulnerable. As attackers become increasingly sophisticated and resourceful, mere reliance on traditional cyber protection, such as intrusion detection, firewalls, and encryption, is insufficient to secure the cyber systems. Cyber resilience provides a new security paradigm that complements inadequate protection with resilience mechanisms. A Cyber-Resilient Mechanism (CRM) adapts to the known or zero-day threats and uncertainties in real-time and strategically responds to them to maintain critical …
PHOENI2X -- A European Cyber Resilience Framework With Artificial-Intelligence-Assisted Orchestration, Automation and Response Capabilities for Business Continuity and Recovery, Incident Response, and Information Exchange
Today's cyber defense tools are mostly watchers. They are not active doers. To be sure, watching too is a demanding affair. These tools monitor the traffic and events; they detect malicious signatures, patterns and anomalies; they might classify and characterize what they observe; they issue alerts, and they might even learn while doing all this. But they don't act. They do little to plan and execute responses to attacks, and they don't plan and execute recovery activities. Response and recovery - core elements of cyber resilience are left to the human cyber analysts, incident responders and s…
A set of about 80 researchers, practitioners, and federal agency program managers participated in the NSF-sponsored Grand Challenges in Resilience Workshop held on Purdue campus on March 19-21, 2019. The workshop was divided into three themes: resilience in cyber, cyber-physical, and socio-technical systems. About 30 attendees in all participated in the discussions of cyber resilience. This article brings out the substantive parts of the challenges and solution approaches that were identified in the cyber resilience theme. In this article, we put forward the substantial challenges in cyber res…
A Formal Resilience Framework for Cyber-Physical Embodied Systems under Device-Level Cyberattacks
Department of Computer Science, Örebro University, Sweden（瑞典 Örebro 大学计算机科学系）；AI, Robotics and Cybersecurity Center (ARC), Örebro University, Sweden（瑞典 Örebro 大学人工智能、机器人与网络安全中心）
Enhancing Network Resilience through Machine Learning-powered Graph Combinatorial Optimization: Applications in Cyber Defense and Information Diffusion
We model a vehicle equipped with an autonomous cyber-defense system in addition to its inherent physical resilience features. When attacked, this ensemble of cyber-physical features (i.e., ``bonware'') strives to resist and recover from the performance degradation caused by the malware's attack. We model the underlying differential equations governing such attacks for piecewise linear characterizations of malware and bonware, develop a discrete time stochastic model, and show that averages of instantiations of the stochastic model approximate solutions to the continuous differential equation. …
Safety is becoming cybersecurity under most circumstances. This should be reflected in the Cybersecurity Resilience Act when it is proposed and agreed upon in the European Union. In this paper, we define a range of principles which this future Act should build upon, a structure and argue why it should be as broad as possible. It is based on what the cybersecurity research community for long have asked for, and on what constitutes clear hard legal rules instead of soft. Important areas such as cybersecurity should be taken seriously, by regulating it in the same way we see other types of critic…
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究中心）
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in critical infrastructure face a pervasive threat from attackers, motivating research into a variety of countermeasures for securing them. Assessing the effectiveness of these countermeasures is challenging, however, as realistic benchmarks of attacks are difficult to manually construct, blindly testing is ineffective due to the enormous search spaces and resource requirements, and intelligent fuzzing approaches require impractical amounts of data and network access. In this work, we propose active fuzzing, an automatic approach for finding test suites of packet-…
Agentic AI for Cyber Resilience: A New Security Paradigm and Its System-Theoretic Foundations
Department of Systems Engineering, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学系统工程系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University（纽约大学电气与计算机工程系）
Securing the Digital World: Protecting smart infrastructures and digital industries with Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled malware and intrusion detection
Multidimensional Resilience for Electrical Power Systems: Systematic Review, Integrated Index, and Validation under Real-World Cyber-Physical Attack Scenarios
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) incorporate the complex and large-scale engineered systems behind critical infrastructure operations, such as water distribution networks, energy delivery systems, healthcare services, manufacturing systems, and transportation networks. Industrial CPS in particular need to simultaneously satisfy requirements of available, secure, safe and reliable system operation against diverse threats, in an adaptive and sustainable way. These adverse events can be of accidental or malicious nature and may include natural disasters, hardware or software faults, cyberattacks, or …
