State-Aware Attack Timing and Resilience Strategy Selection in Cyber-Kinetic Freight Disruption

Abstract The increasing digitalization of freight transportation creates opportunities for cyber compromise to produce physical freight movement disruptions and downstream operational consequences. This study examines whether a defender’s resilience strategy should change when an attacker can observe evolving freight and inventory conditions and adapt disruption timing accordingly. We develop a sequential defender-attacker model of a time-sensitive freight system in which the defender selects an ex-ante resilience strategy before operational uncertainty is realized. State-aware attack timing is compared with stochastic disruption and a precommitted strategic benchmark while holding the attacker’s disruption capability constant. The analysis considers two resilience mechanisms: inventory buffering and structural freight resilience through freight exposure dispersion or alternative transportation capability. Results show that state-aware timing can, under certain conditions, reverse the defender’s preferred resilience strategy, with inventory buffering preferred under stochastic and pre-committed timing but freight dispersion becoming preferable when the attacker can condition timing on the realized operational state. In our computational analysis, selecting inventory buffering under a stochastic or pre-committed threat model when the threat is state-aware increases expected loss by 19% relative to the optimal state-aware resilience strategy. Sensitivity analysis identifies when this reversal occurs, including the roles of operational uncertainty, attacker information accuracy, freight-dispersion effectiveness, and the cost of operational interruption. Importantly, perfect operational visibility is not required for the resilience choice to change. These findings show that accounting for an adversary’s information and ability to adapt disruption timing can be important when selecting resilience investments against cyber-kinetic freight disruption.