Summary: Our reliance on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is growing. As CPS infrastructure becomes exposed to the contested world through networks, CPS security becomes much more important. In a CPS, the cyber components manage the physical components. We propose that the overall goal for CPS resiliency is to have the physical systems behave properly regardless of fault and disruption. Our approach to CPS resiliency focuses on the physical components. Specifically, the inertia of the physical components provide a natural but limited resilience, and is capable of tolerating short-term disruption without affecting the health and safety of the CPS. This and the fact CPS have a large difference between physical and cyber time scales, enables a unique approach to CPS resiliency. This talk will present our approach of engineering the cyber components to be brittle against attack, which consequently forces cyber attacks and related disruptions to be short-lived and within tolerance of the physical system’s inertia.
