Cybersecurity Challenges in Distributed Control

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in distributed control architectures for cyber-physical systems, highlighting their cyber vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies, emphasizing the importance of cybersecurity in modern control systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of distributed control architectures, their cyber vulnerabilities, and mitigation schemes, identifying key research gaps in cybersecurity for cyber-physical systems.

Findings

Distributed control enhances robustness and observability.

Cyber vulnerabilities are prevalent in distributed control systems.

Mitigation strategies are emerging but require further research.

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems are becoming core of the most modern systems consisting control, data sharing and real-time monitoring. While centralized control technique has been implemented in the past, recent innovation in distributed control schemes makes it attractive due to various reasons. One of them is the use of state-of-the-art communication protocols that makes the system more robust toward extreme conditions and ensures observability. Thus, as an application of cyber-physical systems, distributed control architectures are prone to various cyber-vulnerability which makes cybersecurity research critical in this application domain. This paper reviews recent researches of distributed control architectures, their cyber-vulnerabilities, and reported mitigation schemes. Finally, some research needs are addressed.