Cyber security for cyber physcial systems: A trust-based approach

Cyber- Physical Systems (CPS) consist of a combination of different embedded subsystems, which work independently of each other and also interact with the external environment. Such embedded systems operate in the presence of inherent uncertainty, context dependencies and adversarial certainty arising from both the cyber and physical worlds. Security is one of the key concepts to shield the CPS environment and different embedding devices in order to have a reliable and secure communication platform. There are many security approaches and methods proposed and implemented globally in order to secure CPS, along with areas such as social engineering, security standards, vendor control, as well as access control implementation, etc. However, in addition to these areas, another important concept, namely trust, is significant in ensuring secure and reliable communications in CPS. In the current state-of-the-art, none of the existing approaches discusses the issue of a secure, trust-based CPS. Thus, to address this shortcoming, in this paper, a two-tier blanket approach is proposed consisting of internal and external layers of trust among different entities to create reliable and secure CPS. This trust-based framework improves the confidence of secure entities joining the CPS system and also builds relationships among entities, thereby increasing the security protecting the formed CPS from outside threats and attacks.