An Effective Semantic Security Metric for Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

the emergence of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) in today’s business world is still steadily progressing to new dimensions. Although they bring many new advantages to business processes and enable automation and a wider range of service capability, they also propose a variety of new challenges. One major challenge, which is introduced by such System-of-Systems (SoS), lies in the security aspect. As security may not have had that significant role in traditional embedded system engineering, a generic way to measure the level of security within an ICPS would provide a significant benefit for system engineers and involved stakeholders. Even though many security metrics and frameworks exist, most of them insufficiently consider an SoS context and the challenges of such environments. Therefore, we aim to define a security metric for ICPS, which measures the level of security during the system design, tests, and integration as well as at runtime. For this, we try to focus on a semantic point of view, which on one hand has not been considered in security metric definitions yet, and on the other hand allows us to handle the complexity of SoS architectures. Furthermore, our approach allows combining the critical characteristics of an ICPS, like uncertainty, required reliability, multi-criticality and safety aspects.