Approaches to Enhancing Cyber Resilience: Report of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Workshop IST-153
It tackles the problem of enhancing cyber resilience for NATO and related stakeholders, but is incremental as it consolidates existing workshop discussions without new empirical results.
This report summarizes a NATO workshop on cyber resilience, addressing the challenge that preventing all cyber attacks is infeasible and emphasizing the need for systems to recover performance after degradation, with discussions on fundamental properties, measurement, modeling, mission modeling, systems engineering, and dynamic defense approaches.
This report summarizes the discussions and findings of the 2017 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Workshop, IST-153, on Cyber Resilience, held in Munich, Germany, on 23-25 October 2017, at the University of Bundeswehr. Despite continual progress in managing risks in the cyber domain, anticipation and prevention of all possible attacks and malfunctions are not feasible for the current or future systems comprising the cyber infrastructure. Therefore, interest in cyber resilience (as opposed to merely risk-based approaches) is increasing rapidly, in literature and in practice. Unlike concepts of risk or robustness - which are often and incorrectly conflated with resilience - resiliency refers to the system's ability to recover or regenerate its performance to a sufficient level after an unexpected impact produces a degradation of its performance. The exact relation among resilience, risk, and robustness has not been well articulated technically. The presentations and discussions at the workshop yielded this report. It focuses on the following topics that the participants of the workshop saw as particularly important: fundamental properties of cyber resilience; approaches to measuring and modeling cyber resilience; mission modeling for cyber resilience; systems engineering for cyber resilience, and dynamic defense as a path toward cyber resilience.