The Need for Cyber-Resilience in Complex Systems

Ensuring safety and security on today's systems, and systems of systems (SoS), has become a challenge. Systems have become large and complex, they operate in dynamic context and face an ever-changing threat landscape. Realistically, potential hidden weaknesses and residual flaws must be expected in an SoS, potentially causing undesired emergent behavior. Consequently, safety and security have become full lifecycle concerns. Cyber-resilience is needed for safeguarding mission continuity, through minimizing impact of any potential disruption, and by providing rapid response and recovery capabilities. This paper provides an overview of how safety and security of a complex system are affected by an expanding system of systems landscape, and have become systems engineering and system lifecycle concerns. The contribution of this paper is to help guiding organizations why and how to incorporate cyber-resilience thinking/engineering in their systems engineering (SE) processes. An SE workflow is proposed to address cyber-resilience in systems engineering.