Cyber-physical systems: A security perspective

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a composition of independently interacting components, including computational elements, communications and control systems. Applications of CPS institute at different levels of integration, ranging from nation-wide power grids, to medium scale, such as the smart home, and small scale, e.g. ubiquitous health care systems including implantable medical devices. Cyber-physical systems primarily transmute how we interact with the physical world, with each system requiring different levels of security based on the sensitivity of the control system and the information it carries. Considering the remarkable progress in CPS technologies during recent years, advancement in security and trust measures is much needed to counter the security violations and privacy leakage of integration elements. This paper focuses on security and privacy concerns at different levels of the composition and presents system level solutions for ensuring the security and trust of modern cyber-physical systems.

I. Introduction

The research relating to cyber-physical systems (CPS) has recently drawn the attention of academia, industry, and the government because of its wide impact to society, economy, and environment [1]. While still lacking in formal definition, cyber-physical systems are largely referred to as the next generation of engineered systems with the integration of communication, computation, and control to achieve the goals of stability, performance, robustness, and efficiency for physical systems [2]. While ongoing research work focuses on achieving these goals, security within CPS is largely ignored [1]. As cyber-physical systems are being widely integrated in various critical infrastructures, however, any security breaches to these systems could have catastrophic consequences. For example, if a vehicle-to-vehicle communication network is compromised, accidents would occur when wrong distance information is transmitted. In fact, the emergence of autonomous cars has further deteriorated the problem since passengers have to trust all decisions made by the vehicles.