A classification of cybersecurity strategies in the context of Discrete Event Systems

Abstract

In recent years, cybersecurity has received increasing attention due to the demand from a large class of networked systems for resilience against cyberattacks that may compromise privacy, integrity and availability. Many of these systems are abstracted as Discrete Event Systems (DES) as their evolution occurs through the occurrence of discrete events. Since they use communication networks and consequently may be vulnerable to attacks, cybersecurity must be considered in DES. Based on this challenging scenario, this work focuses on cybersecurity strategies in the context of DES. A systematic literature mapping (SLM) was carried out, which selected 208 papers on the aforementioned topic. These papers were analyzed and categorized regarding the characteristics of each cybersecurity strategy, the types of attacks considered and also the modeling formalism used. The primary objective of this work is to collect all relevant research in the literature to provide the state of the art on cybersecurity strategies for DES, as well as identify research trends and directions for future work on the topic. The results show that the majority of the selected papers present cybersecurity methods based on the strategy of protecting systems against passive attacks, using automata as the modeling formalism. In contrast, the topic of active attacks has gained attention in recent years, with an increasing number of papers published in several journals and conferences. Finally, research gaps and challenges are presented to provide future directions in the domain of the cybersecurity of DES.