Modeling and Simulation Approaches for Cybersecurity Impact Analysis: State-of-the-Art

Designing resilient critical infrastructures involves ensuring the secure operation of the underlying systems and their components. Due to the ever-increasing integration of cyber components to monitor and control physical processes in such systems, cyberattacks can not only compromise the cyberinfrastructure but can also disrupt, delay, or thwart the physical processes and operations. Thus, a comprehensive cybersecurity assessment framework mandates analyzing the potential impact that successful exploits may have on such systems. In this paper, we survey the existing literature to aggregate the diverse modeling and simulation-based approaches that have been used to define and/or characterize the impact of attacks on cyber-physical and industrial control systems. The resulting analysis provides insight into the varying definitions of impact and domains of application, providing recommendations to guide future impact analysis studies.