Fundamental Concepts of Cyber Resilience: Introduction and Overview
It tackles the problem of cyber risk management for system operators by introducing resilience as an alternative to traditional hardening, but it is incremental as it builds on existing systems concepts.
The paper addresses the need for new management approaches to handle evolving threats in cyber systems, proposing resilience as a key concept to adapt and recover from attacks, and discusses assessment and improvement methods.
Given the rapid evolution of threats to cyber systems, new management approaches are needed that address risk across all interdependent domains (i.e., physical, information, cognitive, and social) of cyber systems. Further, the traditional approach of hardening of cyber systems against identified threats has proven to be impossible. Therefore, in the same way that biological systems develop immunity as a way to respond to infections and other attacks, so too must cyber systems adapt to ever-changing threats that continue to attack vital system functions, and to bounce back from the effects of the attacks. Here, we explain the basic concepts of resilience in the context of systems, discuss related properties, and make business case of cyber resilience. We also offer a brief summary of ways to assess cyber resilience of a system, and approaches to improving cyber resilience.