A methodological review on attack and defense strategies in cyber warfare

Abstract

Cyberspace is an integration of cyber physical system components that integrates computation, networking, physical processes, embedded computers and network monitors which uses feedback loops for controlling the processes where the computations are affected by processes and vice versa. More general, cyber physical systems include all equipments operated on preprogrammed instructions ranging from simple electronic devices to the ultra-modern warfare equipments along with life saving devices. Active cyber-attacks can cause cyber warfare situations by disrupting an entire community of people, which in turn raises an emergency situation to the nation. Thus, cyber warfare is a major threat to the nation at large. In this paper, we analyze the various aspects of cyber warfare situations and a survey on ongoing attacks, defense and cyber forensics strategies in that field. Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging computing area which enables Machine to Machine communication in cyber physical systems. An attack on IoT causes major issues to the security on the devices and thus, the various threats and attacks on IoT are analyzed here. Overall monitoring and data acquisition in cyber physical systems is done by Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems and are mainly targeted by the attackers in order to leave the cyberspace applications not functioning. Therefore, the various threats, attacks and research issues pertaining to the cyberspace are surveyed in this paper along with a few research issues and challenges that are to be solved in the area of cyber warfare.