Cyber-Physical War Gaming

TL;DR

This paper discusses strategies for conducting cyber war games on cyber-physical systems, enabling security testing and validation without risking operational systems, and highlights their use in validating cyber-defense models.

Contribution

It introduces general strategies for cyber war gaming of CPSs and demonstrates their application in testing and validating cyber-defense models at ARL.

Findings

Effective war gaming strategies for CPS security

Use of recorded war game actions to validate security models

Application of war games to real-world cyber defense validation

Abstract

This paper presents general strategies for cyber war gaming of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) that are used for cyber security research at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL). Since Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and other CPSs are operational systems, it is difficult or impossible to perform security experiments on actual systems. The authors describe how table-top strategy sessions and realistic, live CPS war games are conducted at ARL. They also discuss how the recorded actions of the war game activity can be used to test and validate cyber-defence models, such as game-theoretic security models.