Cyber Resilience: A Pre-Understanding for an Abductive Research Agenda

Abstract

Digital transformation turns critical infrastructures into cyber-physical systems, introducing unprecedented levels of complexity and vulnerability. As the evidence of surprise and shocks involving cyber-physical systems is high and rising, concepts of resilience are increasingly enrolled in discourses around vulnerability in critical infrastructures. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical foundations for a concept of cyber resilience, and the needs, potentials, and pitfalls in this respect. Our aim is to point to a research agenda of abductive reasoning, where a concept of resilience is developed through stepwise, reflexive theoretical advances together with ongoing efforts of empirical grounding in particular cyber-physical domains.