Evaluation of a Cyber Risk Assessment Approach for Cyber-Physical Systems: Maritime and Energy Use Cases

Abstract

In various domains such as energy, manufacturing, and maritime, cyber-physical systems (CPS) have seen increased interest. Both academia and industry have focused on the cybersecurity aspects of such systems. The assessment of cyber risks in CPS is a popular research area with many existing approaches that aim to suggest relevant methods and practices. However, few works have addressed the extensive and objective evaluation of the proposed approaches. In this paper, a standard-aligned evaluation methodology is presented and empirically conducted to evaluate a newly proposed cyber risk assessment approach for CPS. The approach, which is called FMECA-ATT&CK is based on Failure Mode, Effects & Criticality Analysis (FMECA) risk assessment process and enriched with the semantics and encoded knowledge in the Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge framework (ATT&CK). Several experts were involved in conducting two risk assessment processes, FMECA-ATT\&CK and Bow-Tie, against two use cases in different application domains, particularly an autonomous passenger ship (APS) as a maritime use case and a digital substation as an energy use case. This allows for the evaluation of the approach based on a group of characteristics, namely, applicability, feasibility, accuracy, comprehensiveness, adaptability, scalability, and usability. The results highlight the positive utility of FMECA-ATT&CK in model-based, design-level, and component-level cyber risk assessment of CPS with several identified directions for improvements. Moreover, the standard-aligned evaluation method and the evaluation characteristics have been demonstrated as enablers for the thorough evaluation of cyber risk assessment methods.

Cybersecurity risk assessment of VDR

“…Moreover, the RS-232 of serial interface family, which supports baud rate 4800 for NMEA 0183 using in the VDR, has vulnerability against buffer overflow attacks (Malviya, 2020). Previous research has shown that NMEA 0183 High Speed is similarly vulnerable (Amro, 2021).…”

“…NMEA 2000 shares vulnerabilities with its underlying CAN serial bus technology. Malicious code can be executed on sniffed packets in the broadcast and packets can be played back (replay attack), invalidate data or inject revised traffic (Amro, 2021). The replay attacks can be performed especially on the audio-visual system because of the insecure communication line between the cameras or microphone and receiving systems, such as VDR.…”