Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 18, numbers 1 and 2, 2025 // View article

Graceful Degradation of Control Device Operation Under Attack

Authors:
Rainer Falk
Christian Feist
Steffen Fries

Keywords: cyber resilience; cyber physical system; industrial security; cybersecurity

Abstract:
Cybersecurity includes preventing, detecting, and reacting to cyber-security attacks. Cyber resilience goes one step further and aims to maintain essential functions even during ongoing attacks, allowing to deliver an intended service or to operate a technical process, and to recover quickly back to regular operation. During an ongoing attack, the impact on the overall system operation is limited if the attacked system stays operational, maybe with degraded performance or functionality. Control devices of a cyber physical system monitor and control a technical process. This paper describes a concept for a control device that reduces its operation depending on the current threat landscape, maintaining its basic and essential functionalities. If attacks have been detected, or if relevant vulnerabilities have been identified, the functionality is increasingly limited, thereby reducing the attack surface in risky situations, while allowing the device and the cyber physical system to stay operational.

Pages: 17 to 24

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2025. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2025

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636