A cybersecurity Approach for Improved System Resilience

Abstract

The ongoing digitalisation of industrial systems is bringing new challenges in managing, monitoring, and predicting the overall reliability performance. The overall reliability of a cyber-physical system, such as railways, is highly influenced by the level of resilience in its inherent digital items. The objective of this paper is to propose a systematic approach, based on an enhanced Cyber Kill Chain model, to improve the overall system resilience through monitoring and prediction. The proposed cybersecurity approach can be used to assess the future cyberattack penetration probabilities based on the present security controls. With the advancement in cybersecurity defensive controls, cyberattacks have continued to evolve through the exploitation of vulnerabilities within the cyber-physical systems. Assuming the possibility of a cyberattack it is necessary to select appropriate security controls so that this attack can be predicted, prevented, or detected before any catastrophic consequences to retain the resilience of the system. Insufficient cybersecurity in the context of cyber-physical systems, such as railways, might have a fatal effect on the whole system availability performance and sometimes may lead to safety risks. However, to improve the overall resilience of a cyber-physical system there is a need of a systematic approach to continuously monitor, predict, and manage the health of the system's digital items with respect to security. Furthermore, the paper will provide a case-study description in railway sector, which has been used for the verification of the proposed approach.