Resilience enhancement of cyber-physical systems: A review

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) represent a complex class of systems that are implied in electric power generation and delivery, as well as in critical infrastructure operations, traffic flow management or healthcare services. CPS consist of a robust combination of computational and physical components, that implement modern technologies such as wireless sensor networks (WSN), Internet of Things and recently Internet of Everything, machine to machine (M2M) communication, smart devices and even smart everything. Cyber-Physical Systems integrate heterogeneous equipment with computing power, which represent an attractive target for various attackers. Successful attacks can lead not only to data breaches, but also to interruption of CPS functioning, hence reducing their availability. CPS are affected also by technical failures and accidents. In order to enhance the CPS resilience, the proposed methods should mitigate the security risks by implementing powerful and robust security measures, in the same time increasing the fault tolerance and redundancy of the system. In this chapter, the authors analyze the state of the art methods for enhancing resilience of Cyber-Physical Systems. In the first section of the chapter the authors review the threats and vulnerabilities that can affect systems functioning. In the second part of the chapter the existing methods for resilience enhancement (redundancy, fault tolerance, security) are presented based on an extensive literature study.