Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 13, numbers 1 and 2, 2020 // View article

Enhancing the Resilience of Cyber-Physical Systems by Protecting the Physical-World Interface

Authors:
Rainer Falk
Steffen Fries

Keywords: cyber security; cyber resilience; system integrity; cyber physical systems; industrial automation and control system; Internet of Things

Abstract:
Cyber physical systems operate and supervise physical, technical systems using information and communication technology, also called Operation Technology (OT). Cyber security solutions focus on the OT part, i.e., on the information and communication technology. The focus of cyber security is protection, detection, and respondence to cyber attacks. Cyber resilience aims at delivering an intended outcome despite attacks and adverse cyber events and even failures not directly caused by attacks. Protecting the link between the control systems and the physical world has been addressed only in some very specific cases, e.g., charging of electric vehicles. We propose a physical-world firewall that limits the impact on the physical world of a successful attack of automation systems, thereby enhancing the resilience of cyber-physical system against successful attacks against software-based functionality of its OT systems.

Pages: 54 to 65

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2020. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2020

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636