Towards an Importance of Security for Cyber-Physical Systems/Internet-of-Things

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) are rising in an importance for the modern world, security is a significant requirement in the development process. This paper presents an overview of how these systems generally work and why securing them at three different layers that are more important compared to traditional software. Since human beings directly interact with the physical devices, therefore it is important to guarantee that they are secure at any point in time. If an intruder gains control over an autonomous car driving system, the consequences could be life-threatening to many people. Cyber-security is trying to prevent this worst-case scenario but struggles with two major problems: First, CPS/IoT are typically a combination of many separate systems. These systems are often legacy software, which sometimes is no longer up-to-date and could provide many security issues, which are hard to patch since the original developers are not part of the new project. Second, classic security measures aimed at the application and the network layer but CPS/IoT provides a third, physical layer, which needs to be protected. Sensors and actuators are physical parts of the real environment and can be damaged or destroyed by any human intruder or natural disaster if not secured properly. Since security in CPS and IoT have been dramatically neglected in the past years, this paper aims at understanding the security of CPS and IoT. Therefore, in this paper we propose an architecture, where we analyzed the security threats for CPS/IoT. Hence, can easily determine the security requirements for CPS/IoT.