Cyber-physical-security model for safety-critical IoT infrastructures

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the number of sensors integrated within safety critical environments is increasing exponentially. System designers employ off-the-shelf hardware to reduce development time and cost, however, the early adoption of consumer hardware and software raises numerous security questions. Several successful attacks and threats to critical infrastructures have been reported. This paper reviews safety-critical applications in aviation, connected cars and power plants. An engineering development roadmap is proposed with cyber-security in mind from “cradle-to-grave” rather than an afterthought. The development roadmap introduces a cybersecurity review at each design step to strengthen the robustness of IoT hardware and software. However, considering these systems have an extremely long lifetime (>20 years), secure maintenance and integrity of ageing infrastructure is usually a secondary consideration. The paper proposes the use of a cyclic cyberphysical security model after system commissioning that allows knowledge transfer between regulatory bodies through sharing of best practices. The sharing will enable system operators to identify exploits encountered from other industries and maintain high security levels and improve the IoT architectures.