Assessing Cyber Risk in Cyber-Physical Systems Using the ATT&CK Framework

Abstract

Autonomous transport is receiving increasing attention, with research and development activities already providing prototype implementations. In this article we focus on Autonomous Passenger Ships (APS), which are being considered as a solution for passenger transport across urban waterways. The ambition of the authors has been to examine the safety and security implications of such a Cyber Physical System (CPS), particularly focusing on threats that endanger the passengers and the operational environment of the APS. Accordingly, the article presents a new risk assessment approach based on a Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) that is enriched with selected semantics and components of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, in order to utilize the encoded common knowledge and facilitate the expression of attacks. Then, the proposed approach is demonstrated through conducting a risk assessment for a communication architecture tailored to the requirements of APSs that were proposed in earlier work. Moreover, we propose a group of graph theory-based metrics for estimating the impact of the identified risks. The use of this method has resulted in the identification of risks and their corresponding countermeasures, in addition to identifying risks with limited existing mitigation mechanisms. The benefits of the proposed approach are the comprehensive, atomic, and descriptive nature of the identified threats, which reduce the need for expert judgment, and the granular impact estimation metrics that reduce the impact of bias. All these features are provided in a semi-automated approach to reduce the required effort and collectively are argued to enrich the design-level risk assessment processes with an updatable industry threat model standard, namely ATT&CK.