Resilience in the Cyber World: Definitions, Features and Models

TL;DR

This paper reviews and synthesizes various definitions of resilience in cyber systems, proposes a holistic definition with attributes, and introduces a theoretical life cycle model adapted for embedded resilient systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of resilience definitions, formulates a unified definition with attributes, and develops a theoretical life cycle model for cyber resilience, especially for embedded systems.

Findings

Identified common core statements in resilience definitions

Proposed a holistic resilience definition with key attributes

Developed a theoretical life cycle model for resilient systems

Abstract

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-engineering we discuss a theoretical model of the life cycle of a (cyber-) resilient system that consists of key actions presented in the literature. We adapt this model for embedded (cyber-) resilient systems.