Mathematical Modeling of Cyber Resilience

TL;DR

This paper develops mathematical models to quantify cyber-physical system resilience against malware attacks, using experiments on autonomous vehicles with integrated cyber-defense and physical resilience features.

Contribution

It introduces parsimonious continuous and stochastic models to measure resilience in cyber-physical systems under attack.

Findings

Quantitative characteristics of responses to cyber compromises identified.

Models successfully simulate system resilience and recovery.

Framework applicable to various cyber-physical systems.

Abstract

We identify quantitative characteristics of responses to cyber compromises that can be learned from repeatable, systematic experiments. We model a vehicle equipped with an autonomous cyber-defense system and which also has some inherent physical resilience features. When attacked by malware, this ensemble of cyber-physical features (i.e., "bonware") strives to resist and recover from the performance degradation caused by the malware's attack. We propose parsimonious continuous models, and develop stochastic models to aid in quantifying systems' resilience to cyber attacks.