Towards a Systematic Threat Modeling Approach for Cyber-physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are systems with seamless integration of physical, computational and networking components. These systems can potentially have an impact on the physical components, hence it is critical to safeguard them against a wide range of attacks. In this paper, it is argued that an effective approach to achieve this goal is to systematically identify the potential threats at the design phase of building such systems, commonly achieved via threat modeling. In this context, a tool to perform systematic analysis of threat modeling for CPS is proposed. A real-world wireless railway temperature monitoring system is used as a case study to validate the proposed approach. The threats identified in the system are subsequently mitigated using National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.