IEEE Access Special Section: Security Analytics and Intelligence for Cyber Physical Systems

A Cyber Physical System (CPS) is a smart network system with actuators, embedded sensors, and processors to interact with the physical world by guaranteeing the performance and supporting real-time operations of safety critical applications. These systems drive innovation and are a source of competitive advantage in today’s challenging world. By observing the behavior of physical processes and activating actions, CPS can alter its behavior to make the physical environment perform better and more accurately. By definition, CPS basically has two major components including cyber systems and physical processes. Examples of CPS include autonomous transportation systems, robotics systems, medical monitoring, automatic pilot avionics, and smart grids. Advances in CPS will empower scalability, capability, usability, and adaptability, which will go beyond the simple systems of today. At the same time, CPS has also increased cybersecurity risks and attack surfaces. Cyber attackers can harm such systems from multiple sources while hiding their identities. As a result of sophisticated threat matrices, insufficient knowledge about threat patterns, and industrial network automation, CPS has become extremely insecure. Since such infrastructure is networked, attacks can be prompted easily without much human participation from remote locations, thereby making CPS more vulnerable to sophisticated cyber-attacks. In turn, large-scale data centers managing a huge volume of CPS data become vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To secure CPS, the role of security analytics and intelligence is significant. It brings together huge amounts of data to create threat patterns, which can be used to prevent cyber-attacks in a timely fashion. The primary objective of this Special Section in IEEE A CCESS is to collect a complementary and diverse set of articles, which demonstrate up-to-date information and innovative developments in the domain of security analytics and intelligence for CPS.