Cyber-Physical Systems Security—A Survey

By Abdulmalik A. Humayed, Jingqiang Lin, Fengjun Li, Bo Luo. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2017

947 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With the exponential growth of cyber-physical systems (CPSs), new security challenges have emerged. Various vulnerabilities, threats, attacks, and controls have been introduced for the new generation of CPS. However, there lacks a systematic review of the CPS security literature. In particular, the heterogeneity of CPS components and the diversity of CPS systems have made it difficult to study the problem with one generalized model. In this paper, we study and systematize existing research on CPS security under a unified framework. The framework consists of three orthogonal coordinates: 1) from the security perspective, we follow the well-known taxonomy of threats, vulnerabilities, attacks and controls; 2) from the CPS components perspective, we focus on cyber, physical, and cyber-physical components; and 3) from the CPS systems perspective, we explore general CPS features as well as representative systems (e.g., smart grids, medical CPS, and smart cars). The model can be both abstract to show general interactions of components in a CPS application, and specific to capture any details when needed. By doing so, we aim to build a model that is abstract enough to be applicable to various heterogeneous CPS applications; and to gain a modular view of the tightly coupled CPS components. Such abstract decoupling makes it possible to gain a systematic understanding of CPS security, and to highlight the potential sources of attacks and ways of protection. With this intensive literature review, we attempt to summarize the state-of-the-art on CPS security, provide researchers with a comprehensive list of references, and also encourage the audience to further explore this emerging field.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Control and Systems Engineering, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba713ebb4f81a3ed114702e5a269454f541c0601

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Citations in the corpus

Cyber-physical systems security: Limitations, issues and future trends (2020, positive): “…aspects of CPS: the different CPS security goals were listed and discussed in [12], [13], [14], [15]; maintaining CPS security was presented in [16]; CPS security challenges and issues were presented in [17], [18]; some of the security issues were reviewed, including big data security [19],…”
A Roadmap Toward the Resilient Internet of Things for Cyber-Physical Systems (2018, background): “The potential threats and consequences can be expressed in security threat models for CPS [38].”
IoT-Enabled Social Relationships Meet Artificial Social Intelligence (2021, methodology): “physical system (CPS) [12], similarly the application represented as entities in the social space are mapped to the cyber space using a cyber-physical social system (CPSS) [13].”
The AI-Based Cyber Threat Landscape (2020, background): “Although researchers have extensively considered the security of CPS itself [34, 44], less attention has been paid to the potential indirect cyber attacks on CPS through the surrounding systems that affect its operation.”
A Survey of IoT-Enabled Cyberattacks: Assessing Attack Paths to Critical Infrastructures and Services (2018, background): “1) Comparison With This Work: Some of the surveys discussed above present various interesting security perspectives, models and categorizations for IoT security [23], [25], [28], [39], [41], or for related areas like cyber-physical systems security [17].”