Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are revolutionizing how we live, work, and interact with the world. These complex systems orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking, and analytics to interact with the physical world and are at the heart of numerous critical industries and applications, from industrial and commercial facilities, to healthcare and the public sector. They enhance interconnectivity between devices and systems across sectors in order to optimize efficiency and enhance productivity.
The first step to protecting your CPS is to understand what these complex assets are and how they operate. Today, we’re exploring the potential and implications of CPS, diving deep into examples across various industries in order to better understand the foundational role of CPS and why they must be protected.
What Are Cyber-Physical Systems?
Simply put, cyber-physical systems connect the physical and cyber world. They are engineered platforms that seamlessly integrate computation, control, networking, and analytics with the physical environment and its users. They hold transformative potential, affecting a wide variety of applications from medical devices to energy systems.
CPS is found in several critical industries. Manufacturing, for example, leverages CPS to drive automation and precision. Similarly, the healthcare industry uses them in advanced medical equipment. These incredibly important assets are fundamental to the operations of these industries, differing from IT devices because they exist in the physical world and contribute to physical processes, from machinery in an assembly line to devices used in surgery.
Because they straddle the cyber and physical worlds, CPS must be protected differently than IT devices. While IT devices often receive frequent software updates and can withstand both active and passive queries, CPS typically contain devices that aren’t updated as frequently. Additionally, the consequences of cyberattacks on CPS can lead to physical damage, safety risks for operators, and serious disruption of business operations.
10 Examples of Cyber-Physical Systems
Here are some common examples of CPS across a range of critical industries.
Operational Technology
Operational technology (OT) uses both hardware and software to change, monitor, or manage physical processes, devices, and events within an organization or environment.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a network of interconnected devices designed to boost industrial efficiency and productivity. IIoT enhances industrial processes by leveraging real-time data analysis, predictive maintenance, quality control, and seamless supply chain management.
Industrial Control Systems (ICS)
Industrial control systems (ICS) are a type of CPS that manages, commands, and regulates industrial processes. They receive commands from an operator and control elements such as valves and pumps to ensure process safety and reliability.
Building Management Systems (BMS)
Building management systems (BMS) are designed to control, monitor, manage, and optimize various systems within a building, such as HVAC, electricity, security, and fire safety. As a type of CPS, BMS allow for energy-saving and cost-efficient building operations, and help preserve the safety, availability, and integrity of building operations occurring within a facility.
Smart Grids
Integrating information and communication with power infrastructure, smart grids are a prime example of CPS. Smart grids offer real-time monitoring, decision making, and energy distribution, which helps evolve the conventional power grid into an intelligent one using digital technology, sensors, and software.
Smart Buildings
Smart buildings employ CPS to enhance comfort, energy efficiency, and security. By integrating sensors, control systems, and software, smart buildings manage lighting, ventilation, power consumption, and more. This optimizes resources and offers a more sustainable built environment.
Robotics
From manufacturing lines to surgical procedures, robotics have transformed various industries. This form of CPS provides enhanced precision, increased productivity, and improved safety.
Smart Transportation Systems
The transportation sector employs CPS for improving efficiency, safety, and sustainability. Transportation organizations rely heavily on this form of CPS for real-time traffic monitoring, route planning, autonomous vehicles, and more.
Medical Devices
In healthcare, CPS has transformed patient care with medical devices, or the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) that monitor patient vitals, dispense medication, or guide surgeries. These systems ensure a high degree of care and reliability, providing improved patient outcomes.
Smart Manufacturing
Smart manufacturing is a form of CPS that provides enhanced efficiency and flexibility in production processes. With real-time optimization of manufacturing operations leading to enhanced productivity.
The Challenges of Managing Cyber-Physical Systems
As we’re seeing, CPS is bringing forth a new era of productivity and efficiency in several key industries. But at the same time, CPS also presents new challenges. These are the top issues to keep in mind.
Traditional IT Tools Don’t Protect CPS
Cybersecurity is not one-size-fits-all, and as we’ve outlined, there is a significant difference between IT and CPS. Utilizing cybersecurity tools meant for IT systems will not protect CPS. In some cases, these solutions could impair sensitive OT devices. CPS requires its own protection tools that have been especially designed to handle considerations unique to CPS, including system fragility, unique architectures, proprietary protocols, and environmental and operational constraints.
Incompatible Protocols
Interoperability between various systems and devices can present difficulties due to a lack of standardized protocols. As CPS continues to grow, the attack surface does as well, and organizations must strive to balance the benefits of improving productivity on one hand with reducing the cyber risk that comes from connectivity on the other.
Growing Security Risks
With so many interconnected devices and the possibilities of potential exposures, CPS and associated devices are an attractive target for cyber attacks. Security concerns are growing day by day, particularly because the stakes of CPS security can have far reaching implications in both the digital and physical world, resulting in damages or losses. Unfortunately, many CPS devices are not designed with security in mind, making it all the more difficult to secure them properly. This makes it that much more important to find the right solution to protect these devices.
Outdated Approaches to Visibility
Due to the sensitive nature of OT devices, the traditional method of achieving asset visibility for OT devices within CPS has emphasized passive queries. In reality, passive-only queries lack the depth necessary for total visibility within CPS.
Scalability
Scalability presents another challenge. As an organization increases its CPS, handling the vast amounts of real-time data generated, and ensuring all systems are updated, secured and running optimally can become an increasingly complex task.
Compliance
The regulatory landscape for CPS is continually evolving. Ensuring compliance with data protection regulations, safety standards, and industry-specific legislation is an ongoing issue that all organizations relying on CPS must address.
Real-Time Data Processing and Actionable Insights
Any lag in real-time data processing can pose challenges within CPS, which typically require a continuous stream of data for constant output to maintain accurate, real-time insights. Similarly, using IT-centric tools can lead to an incomplete asset inventory that would otherwise be achievable with CPS-specific tools. Lacking a complete asset inventory can impact an organization’s ability to take actionable steps towards threat detection, vulnerability management, network segmentation, and more.
How to Optimize Your Cyber-Physical Systems
With these challenges in mind, effective management strategies for CPS are imperative. Consider these strategies to protect your CPS.
Exposure Management
One incident could be potentially devastating to a business. To stay ahead of this possibility, determine the impact exposures could have on business operations and build a programmatic approach to continuous threat exposure management that is specifically designed for CPS.
Network Protection
Without visibility into your network, it’s difficult to identify what each connected device is and how it communicates. Taking steps like network segmentation, optimization, and policy compliance monitoring is key for protecting your entire network.
Secure Access
Traditional methods of remote access can be risky, making a secure access solution that provides privileged access and identity management imperative.
Threat Detection
Utilizing a CPS protection platform that detects both known and unknown threats is foundational to protecting the security of operational environments.
Selecting a Cyber-Physical System Protection Platform
To directly face the challenges presented above and fully leverage the potential of CPS, organizations require robust strategies to protect and secure every part of their network. The first step is to evaluate your CPS protection platform to understand whether it is capable of handling every aspect of CPS security your environment demands.
Some of the most important criteria to look for in the selection process for a robust CPS protection platform include:
Industry Expertise
Selecting a platform that displays industry expertise and a deep commitment to driving progress in the CPS protection sector is one indication of that platform’s merits. Award winning products and research teams, working with manufacturers to disclose vulnerabilities, and equipping customers with the means to leverage stronger protection against threats make a significant impact on your CPS protection strategy.
Deep Asset Visibility
It’s only through multiple discovery methods that you can achieve deep visibility within all CPS devices connected to your network. This means choosing a platform that uses both active and passive discovery methods, including those that use unique or proprietary protocols, are air-gapped, or are otherwise unreachable through passive-only methods.
Broad Solution Set
Limited use-cases can be a sign that a platform doesn’t have the breadth of experience to address all your needs. Seek out a vendor with depth in their portfolio that supports all types of CPS across the XIoT, deployment needs, and network architectures. Your unique needs and environments should be supported by their offering.
Enable Better Business Outcomes
The right data elements are critical to achieving better business outcomes. By giving you the option of managing, monitoring, and controlling your CPS security solutions in one place, the right solution can help you streamline risk management, apply compensating controls, respond to threats, and manage your overall security posture.
Deployment Flexibility
Having the option to deploy cybersecurity products on-premises or in the cloud, with the option to function on user-supplied software, is essential. This can help cut costs that come with acquiring, maintaining, and updating hardware and gives you the flexibility to determine where and how to deploy the solution based on your unique requirements.
Claroty is an industry leader in CPS protection and trusted across industries to deliver unmatched visibility, protection, and threat detection. The Claroty Platform is purpose-built to provide comprehensive protection of CPS environments, and is the cornerstone of a robust CPS protection program. Not only does it provide industry-leading asset discovery capabilities, but it also offers threat detection, network protection, exposure management, and secure access an organization needs to stay protected while minimizing business impacts of a potential security incident.
