Cyber-Resilience Evaluation of Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces metrics to quantify the resilience of cyber-physical systems against attacks, enabling assessment of their ability to recover and maintain safety through mathematical modeling and simulation.

Contribution

It proposes novel resilience metrics based on system design, stability, and performance, validated through simulation on a real-world control problem.

Findings

Metrics effectively quantify CPS resilience levels.

Simulation demonstrates the metrics' applicability.

Resilience assessment aids in system design and safety assurance.

Abstract

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 to face the adversaries. This way, it is possible to quantify the ability to recover from an adversary using its mathematical model based on switched linear systems and actuators saturation. Finally, we validate our approach using a numeric simulation on the Tennesse Eastman control challenge problem.