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The constantly evolving cyber threat landscape is a latent problem for today's companies. This is especially true for the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) because they have limited resources to face the threats but, as a group, represent an extensive payload for cybercriminals to exploit. Moreover, the traditional cybersecurity approach of protecting against known threats cannot withstand the rapidly evolving technologies and threats used by cybercriminals. This study claims that cyber resilience, a more holistic approach to cybersecurity, could help SMEs anticipate, detect, withstand, recover from and evolve after cyber incidents. However, to operationalize cyber resilience is not an easy task, and thus, the study presents a framework with a corresponding implementation order for SMEs that could help them implement cyber resilience practices. The framework is the result of using a variation of Design Science Research in which Grounded Theory was used to induce the most important actions required to implement cyber resilience and an iterative evaluation from experts to validate the actions and put them in a logical order. Therefore, this study proposes that the framework could benefit SME managers to understand cyber resilience, as well as help them start implementing it with concrete actions and an order dictated by the experience of experts. This could potentially ease cyber resilience implementation for SMEs by making them aware of what cyber resilience implies, which dimensions it includes and what actions can be implemented to increase their cyber resilience.

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The growing adoption of Radio-frequency Identification (RFID) systems, particularly in the healthcare field, demonstrates that RFID is a positive asset for healthcare institutions. RFID offers the ability to save organizations time and costs by enabling data of traceability, identification, communication, temperature and location in real time for both people and resources. However, the RFID systems challenges are financial, technical, organizational and above all privacy and security. For this reason, recent works focus on attribute-based access control (ABAC) schemes. Currently, ABAC are based on mostly centralized models, which in environments such as the supply chain can present problems of scalability, synchronization and trust between the parties. In this manuscript, we implement an ABAC model in RFID systems based on a decentralized model such as blockchain. Common criteria for the selection of the appropriate blockchain are detailed. Our access control policies are executed through the decentralized application (DApp), which interfaces with the blockchain through the smart contract. Smart contracts and blockchain technology, on the one hand, solve current centralized systems issues as well as being flexible infrastructures that represent the relationship of trust and support essential in the ABAC model in order to provide the security of RFID systems. Our system has been designed for a supply chain environment with an use case suitable for healthcare systems, so that assets such as surgical instruments containing an associated RFID tag can only access to specific areas. Our system is deployed in both a local and Testnet environment in order to stablish a deep comparison and determining the technical feasibility.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Supervisory Control systems and Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks implement industrial communication protocols to enable their operations. Modbus is an application protocol that allows communication between millions of automation devices. Unfortunately, Modbus lacks basic security mechanisms, and this leads to multiple vulnerabilities, due to both design and implementation. This issue enables certain types of attacks, for example, man in the middle attacks, eavesdropping attacks, and replay attack. The exploitation of such flaws may greatly influence companies and the general population, especially for attacks targeting critical infrastructural assets, such as power plants, water distribution and railway transportation systems. In order to provide security mechanisms to the protocol, the Modbus organization released security specifications, which provide robust protection through the blending of Transport Layer Security (TLS) with the traditional Modbus protocol. TLS will encapsulate Modbus packets to provide both authentication and message-integrity protection. The security features leverage X.509v3 digital certificates for authentication of the server and client. From the security specifications, this study addresses the security problems of the Modbus protocol, proposing a new secure version of a role-based access control model (RBAC), in order to authorize both the client on the server, as well as the Modbus frame. This model is divided into an authorization process via roles, which is inserted as an arbitrary extension in the certificate X.509v3 and the message authorization via unit id, a unique identifier used to authorize the Modbus frame. Our proposal is evaluated through two approaches: A security analysis and a performance analysis. The security analysis involves verifying the protocol’s resistance to different types of attacks, as well as that certain pillars of cybersecurity, such as integrity and confidentiality, are not compromised. Finally, our performance analysis involves deploying our design over a testnet built on GNS3. This testnet has been designed based on an industrial security standard, such as IEC-62443, which divides the industrial network into levels. Then both the client and the server are deployed over this network in order to verify the feasibility of the proposal. For this purpose, different latencies measurements in industrial environments are used as a benchmark, which are matched against the latencies in our proposal for different cipher suites.

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Due to the hazardous current cyber environment, cyber resilience is more necessary than ever. Companies are exposed to an often-ignored risk of suffering a cyber incident. This places cyber incidents as one of the main risks for companies in the past few years. On the other hand, the literature meant to aid on the operationalization of cyber resilience is mostly focused on listing the policies required to operationalize it, but is often lacking on how to prioritize these actions and how to strategize their implementation. Therefore, the usage of the current literature in this state is not optimal for companies. Thus, this study proposes a progression model to help companies strategize and prioritize cyber resilience policies by proposing the natural evolution of the policies over time. To develop the model, this study used semi-structured interviews and an analysis of the data obtained from the interviews. Through this methodology, this study found the starting points for each cyber resilience policy and their natural progression over time. These results can help companies in their cyber resilience building process by giving them insights on how to strategize the implementation of the cyber resilience policies.

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