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.
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…
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…
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. …
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
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…
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…
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 …
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）
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…
Enhancing Network Resilience through Machine Learning-powered Graph Combinatorial Optimization: Applications in Cyber Defense and Information Diffusion
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）
Network diversity has been widely recognized as an effective defense strategy to mitigate the spread of malware. Optimally diversifying network resources can improve the resilience of a network against malware propagation. This work proposes an efficient method to compute such an optimal deployment, in the context of upgrading a legacy Industrial Control System with modern IT infrastructure. Our approach can tolerate various constraints when searching for an optimal diversification, such as outdated products and strict configuration policies. We explicitly measure the vulnerability similarity …
Self-propagating malware (SPM) has led to huge financial losses, major data breaches, and widespread service disruptions in recent years. In this paper, we explore the problem of developing cyber resilient systems capable of mitigating the spread of SPM attacks. We begin with an in-depth study of a well-known self-propagating malware, WannaCry, and present a compartmental model called SIIDR that accurately captures the behavior observed in real-world attack traces. Next, we investigate ten cyber defense techniques, including existing edge and node hardening strategies, as well as newly develop…
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 …
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 …
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are often defended in the same manner as information technology (IT) systems -- by using perimeter security. Multiple factors make such defenses insufficient for CPS. Resiliency shows potential in overcoming these shortfalls. Techniques for achieving resilience exist; however, methods and theory for evaluating resilience in CPS are lacking. We argue that such methods and theory should assist stakeholders in deciding where and how to apply design patterns for resilience. Such a problem potentially involves tradeoffs between different objectives and criteria, and suc…
The design of attacks for cyber physical systems is critical to assess CPS resilience at design time and run-time, and to generate rich datasets from testbeds for research. Attacks against cyber physical systems distinguish themselves from IT attacks in that the main objective is to harm the physical system. Therefore, both cyber and physical system knowledge are needed to design such attacks. The current practice to generate attacks either focuses on the cyber part of the system using IT cyber security existing body of knowledge, or uses heuristics to inject attacks that could potentially har…
The role of mathematics in a complex system such as the Internet has yet to be deeply explored. In this paper, we summarize some of the important and pressing problems in cyber security from the viewpoint of open science environments. We start by posing the question "What fundamental problems exist within cyber security research that can be helped by advanced mathematics and statistics?" Our first and most important assumption is that access to real-world data is necessary to understand large and complex systems like the Internet. Our second assumption is that many proposed cyber security solu…
