Cyber resilience assessment and enhancement of cyber-physical systems: structural controllability perspective

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of developing a unified method for quantifying and improving the cyber resilience of large-scale cyber-physical systems (CPSs) against cyber-attacks targeting structural controllability. To this end, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions to extend the concept of structural controllability of single-layer systems to two-layer CPSs comprising of power network as the physical layer and communication network as the cyber layer. Next, in order to assess cyber resilience, we introduce the notion of $R$-resilient CPS as the maximum number of cyber nodes that can be attacked by an adversary while preserving the structural controllability of the entire CPS. Furthermore, we provide an algorithm to find the optimal network reconfiguration matrix to increase the resilience level of CPS from $R$-resilient to $(R+1)$-resilient by adding a minimum number of transmission lines to the physical layer or communication links to the cyber layer, or both. Additionally, the proposed methodology is extended to achieve $(R+\alpha )$-resilient CPS, where α>1. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through simulations of IEEE 14, IEEE 39, and IEEE 118 power networks with different cyber topologies, considering four scenarios of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, including targeted and random node attacks.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber-physical systems
• cyber-attack
• large-scale systems
• controllability
• resilience
• multilayer networks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).