Survey of Automotive Cyber-Physical System Security

Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems can be defined as engineered systems built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computation and physical components. CPS tightly integrate computing devices, actuation and control, networking infrastructure, and sensing of the physical world”.

In a survey of CPS, Khaitan, and McCalley classify existing work and identify challenges. They discuss the challenges involved in ensuring the security of cyber-physical systems and discuss work done to detect and prevent intrusions and cyber-attacks. They note that CPSs have various applications, such as in vehicular systems, medical and healthcare systems, smart homes, buildings, etc. (Khaitan et al., 2015). In discussing security-related aspects of cyber-physical systems, Khaitan and McCalley describe securing a CPS as “extremely challenging” due to how interconnected the various components of CPSs are. Since many components depend on each other, if one component fails, it may have a “cascading effect” (Khaitan et al., 2015).

Chattopadhyay and Lam describe a generic attack model for CPSs (Chattopadhyay et al., 2017) (Figure 1). It breaks the attacks into cyber and physical components, discussing possible threats for each. While this is just a generic model and does not cover specific CPSs, the figure is essential in broadly understanding the attack capabilities on CPSs.

Figure 1.

Generic CPS attack model.

Figure from (Chattopadhyay et al., 2017)