A review on cybersecurity in railways

Abstract

Digitalisation is transforming the railway globally. One of the major considerations in digital transformation of any industry including the railway is the increased exposure to cyberattacks. The railway industry is vulnerable to these attacks because since the number of digital items and also number of interfaces between digital and physical components in the railway systems keep increasing. Increased number of items and interfaces require new frameworks, concepts and architectures to ensure the railway system’s resilience with respect to cybersecurity challenges, such as lack of proactiveness, lack of holistic perspective and obsolescence of safety systems exposed to current and future cyber threats landscape. To this date, there are several works carried out in the literature that studied the cybersecurity aspects and its application on railway infrastructure. However, to develop and implement an appropriate roadmap to cybersecurity in railways, there is a need of describing emerging challenges, and approaches to deal with these challenges and the possibilities and benefits of these. Hence, the objective of this paper is to provide a systematic review and outline cybersecurity emerging trends and approaches, and also to identify possible solutions by querying literature, academic and industrial, for future directions. The authors of this paper conducted separate searches through four popular databases, that is, Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science and IEEE explore. For the screening process, authors have used keywords with Boolean operators and database filters and identified 90 articles most relevant to the study domain. The analysis of 90 articles shows that majority of the cybersecurity studies lies within the railways are conceptual and lags in application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based security. Like other industries, it is very important that railways should also follow latest security technologies, trends and train their workforce for cyber hygiene since railways are already in digitalization transition mode.

Digital Transformation and Cybersecurity Challenges for Businesses Resilience: Issues and Recommendations

“…Similarly, Özsungur [ 93 ] researched business strategy for cybersecurity in digital transformation, and Nguyen Duc [ 94 ] documented security risk from an engineering perspective. Furthermore, Hai et al [ 1 ] highlighted the opportunities and challenges for emerging countries regarding digital transformation, and Kour’s work [ 95 ] focused on cybersecurity implications in the railway domain. Despite these surveys within the literature, no survey has presented a domain taxonomy and looked into cybersecurity implications in diverse industries, as has been explored in this paper.…”

“…Similarly, Özsungur [93] researched business strategy for cybersecurity in digital transformation, and Nguyen Duc [94] documented security risk from an engineering perspective. Furthermore, Hai et al [1] highlighted the opportunities and challenges for emerging countries regarding digital transformation, and Kour's work [95] focused on cybersecurity implications in the railway domain. Despite these surveys within the literature, no survey has In the literature, some review articles have focused on digital transformation, such as an article by Metawa et al [92], which investigated the role of information in digital transformation in the context of Egyptian small-and medium-scale enterprises.…”

Virtual Coupling in Railways: A Comprehensive Review

“…However, with regard to communication, cybersecurity seems to be a future key aspect to be developed. Reference [207] presented a systematic review and outlined emerging trends and approaches in cybersecurity. Possible solutions were identified by consulting the literature, academia, and industry for future directions.…”

Hunting Network Anomalies in a Railway Axle Counter System

“…Although there are many novel state-of-the-art security-enhancing features and frameworks, one of the research gaps in railway security, as identified by the recent review paper on the subject [ 17 ], is the lack of experimental validation. While some works include experimental data, they are often extracted out of a software simulation, whose behavior might deviate from real-world scenarios.…”