An Experimentation Infrastructure for Quantitative Measurements of Cyber Resilience

TL;DR

This paper develops a cost-effective experimentation infrastructure to quantitatively measure cyber resilience in cyber-physical systems, enabling objective assessment of resilience improvements through high-fidelity data collection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel infrastructure for rigorous, quantitative measurement of cyber resilience, advancing beyond previous tabletop exercises with higher fidelity data collection.

Findings

Constructed a cost-effective experimentation infrastructure.

Generated high-fidelity data for resilience measurement.

Demonstrated the infrastructure's utility through a case study.

Abstract

The vulnerability of cyber-physical systems to cyber attack is well known, and the requirement to build cyber resilience into these systems has been firmly established. The key challenge this paper addresses is that maturing this discipline requires the development of techniques, tools, and processes for objectively, rigorously, and quantitatively measuring the attributes of cyber resilience. Researchers and program managers need to be able to determine if the implementation of a resilience solution actually increases the resilience of the system. In previous work, a table top exercise was conducted using a notional heavy vehicle on a fictitious military mission while under a cyber attack. While this exercise provided some useful data, more and higher fidelity data is required to refine the measurement methodology. This paper details the efforts made to construct a cost-effective experimentation infrastructure to provide such data. It also presents a case study using some of the data generated by the infrastructure.