Measuring Cyber Resilience of IoT-Enabled Critical National Infrastructures

Adewumi, A, Hammoudeh, M, Dargahi, T ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0908-6483 and Jogunola, O ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2701-9524 (2024) Measuring Cyber Resilience of IoT-Enabled Critical National Infrastructures. In: ACNS 2024, March 5–8, 2024, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

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Abstract

Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) is vital and critical to the delivery of essential services to society and is necessary for a country to function properly. CNI are increasingly being connected to the internet to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. The adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) introduced new attack vectors which have necessitated a need to build and improve cyber resilience in CNI. The quantification of cyber resilience via metrics is one of the ways to improve resilience. However, there is currently no standard methodology and metrics to quantitatively measure cyber resilience in CNI. This paper proposes a list of suitable cyber resilience metrics for IoT-enabled CNI. Smart grid is considered as a CNI case study to measure the effectiveness of the proposed cyber resilience metrics. Evaluation of the systemic impact metric on smart grid showed that the performance of the system under an attack is dependent on the recovery time; hence, the higher the systemic impact, the lower the resilience of the CNI and vice versa. Quantifying the resilience of CNI is crucial to determining the security control defenses required to reduce the impact of a cyber attack.