Taxonomy for description of cross-domain attacks on CPS

Mark Yampolskiy, Peter Horvath, Xenofon D. Koutsoukos, Yuan Xue, Janos Sztipanovits
2013 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international conference on High confidence networked systems - HiCoNS '13  
The pervasiveness of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in various aspects of the modern society grows rapidly and CPS become attractive targets for various kinds of attacks. We consider cybersecurity as an integral part of CPS security. Additionally, the necessity exists to investigate the CPS-specific aspects which are out of scope of cyber-security. Most importantly, attacks capable to cross the cyber-physical domain boundary should be analyzed. The vulnerability of CPS to such cross-domain
more » ... has been practically proven by numerous examples, e.g., by the currently most famous Stuxnet attack. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy for description of attacks on CPS. The proposed taxonomy is capable of representing both conventional cyber-attacks as well as cross-domain attacks. Furthermore, based on the proposed taxonomy, we define an attack categorization. Several possible application areas of the proposed taxonomy are extensively discussed. Among others, it can be used to establish a knowledge base about attacks on CPS that are known in the literature. Furthermore, the proposed description structure will foster the quantitative and qualitative analysis of these attacks, both of which are necessarily to improve CPS security.
doi:10.1145/2461446.2461465 dblp:conf/hicons/YampolskiyHKXS13 fatcat:y2mmg6nftjhahejhbqihpwtlfe