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1. Evaluating the effects of cyber-attacks on cyber physical systems using a hardware-in-the-loop simulation testbed

   https://doi.org/10.1109/RWEEK.2017.8088669  

   Potteiger, Bradley ; Emfinger, William ; Neema, Himanshu ; Koutosukos, Xenofon ; Tang, CheeYee ; Stouffer, Keith ( September 2017 , 2017 Resilience Week (RWS))

   Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) consist of embedded computers with sensing and actuation capability, and are integrated into and tightly coupled with a physical system. Because the physical and cyber components of the system are tightly coupled, cyber-security is important for ensuring the system functions properly and safely. However, the effects of a cyberattack on the whole system may be difficult to determine, analyze, and therefore detect and mitigate. This work presents a model based software development framework integrated with a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed for rapidly deploying CPS attack experiments. The framework provides the ability to emulate low level attacks and obtain platform specific performance measurements that are difficult to obtain in a traditional simulation environment. The framework improves the cybersecurity design process which can become more informed and customized to the production environment of a CPS. The developed framework is illustrated with a case study of a railway transportation system. 

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2. Protecting Cyber-Physical System Testbeds from Red-Teaming/Blue-Teaming Experiments Gone Awry

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21280-2_8  

   Talukder, M.R.H. ; Amin, M.A. ; Ray, I ( November 2022 , Information Security Practice and Experience. ISPEC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

   Su, C. ; Gritzalis, D. ; Piuri, V. (Ed.)

   Many cyber-physical systems (CPS) are critical infrastructure. Security attacks on these critical systems can have catastrophic consequences, putting human lives at risk. Consequently, it is very important to pace CPS systems to red-teaming/blue teaming exercises to understand vulnerabilities and the progression/impact of cyber attacks on them. Since it is not always prudent to conduct such security exercises on live CPS, researchers use CPS testbeds to conduct security-related experiments. Often, such testbeds are very expensive. Since attack scripts used in red-teaming/blue-teaming exercises are, in the strictest sense of the term, malicious in nature, there is a need to protect the testbed itself from these attack experiments that have the potential to go awry. Moreover, when multiple experiments are conducted on the same testbed, there is a need to maintain isolation among these experiments so that no experiment can accidentally or maliciously affect/compromise others. In this work, we describe a novel security architecture and framework to ensure protection of security-related experiments on a CPS testbed and at the same time support secure communication services among simultaneously running experiments based on well-formulated access control policies. 

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3. Provable Adversarial Safety in Cyber-Physical Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00062  

   Castellanos, John H. ; Maghenem, Mohamed ; Cárdenas, Alvaro A. ; Sanfelice, Ricardo G. ; Zhou, Jianying ( July 2023 , IEEE)

   Most proposals for securing control systems are heuristic in nature, and while they increase the protection of their target, the security guarantees they provide are unclear. This paper proposes a new way of modeling the security guarantees of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) against arbitrary false command attacks. As our main case study, we use the most popular testbed for control systems security. We first propose a detailed formal model of this testbed and then show how the original configuration is vulnerable to a single-actuator attack. We then propose modifications to the control system and prove that our modified system is secure against arbitrary, single-actuator attacks. 

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4. Explainable AI for Prioritizing and Deploying Defenses for Cyber-Physical System Resiliency

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TPS-ISA58951.2023.00032  

   Ray, Indrajit ; Sreedharan, Sarath ; Podder, Rakesh ; Bashir, Shadaab Kawnain ; Ray, Indrakshi ( November 2023 , IEEE)

   The adoption of digital technology in industrial control systems (ICS) enables improved control over operation, ease of system diagnostics and reduction in cost of maintenance of cyber physical systems (CPS). However, digital systems expose CPS to cyber-attacks. The problem is grave since these cyber-attacks can lead to cascading failures affecting safety in CPS. Unfortunately, the relationship between safety events and cyber-attacks in ICS is ill-understood and how cyber-attacks can lead to cascading failures affecting safety. Consequently, CPS operators are ill-prepared to handle cyber-attacks on their systems. In this work, we envision adopting Explainable AI to assist CPS oper-ators in analyzing how a cyber-attack can trigger safety events in CPS and then interactively determining potential approaches to mitigate those threats. We outline the design of a formal framework, which is based on the notion of transition systems, and the associated toolsets for this purpose. The transition system is represented as an AI Planning problem and adopts the causal formalism of human reasoning to asssit CPS operators in their analyses. We discuss some of the research challenges that need to be addressed to bring this vision to fruition. 

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5. Attack Recovery for Cyber-Physical Systems

   Kong, Fanxin ; Wang, Zifan ( October 2023 , EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems and Smart Vehicles)

   Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) rely on computing components to control physical objects, and have been widely used in real-world life-critical applications. However, a CPS has security risks by nature due to the integration of many vulnerable subsystems, which adversaries exploit to inflict serious consequences. Among various attacks, sensor attacks pose a particularly significant threat, where an attacker maliciously modifies sensor measurements to drift system behavior. There is a lot of work in sensor attack prevention and detection. Nevertheless, an essential problem is overlooked: recovery--what to do after detecting a sensor attack, which needs to safely and timely bring a CPS back. We aim to highlight the need to investigate this problem, outline its four key challenges, and provide a brief overview of initial solutions in the field. 

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