A Resilient Technical Architecture Solution Based on a Proposed Cyber Resilience Strategy

Abstract

Cyber resilience is an emerging concept that complements existing cybersecurity practices. We introduced cyber resilience after acknowledging that more than cybersecurity, which aims to prevent adversaries from gaining access, is needed. Statistics indicate that cyber attacks frequently and increasingly succeed in disrupting our cyber infrastructures. When that happens, cyber resilience fills this gap by providing resiliency to maintain essential functions and recover swiftly in the event of an attack, hence ensuring continuity and stability when cybersecurity defenses are breached.

Although the EU directive on cyber resilience (DORA) will not become effective until 2025, many papers have already discussed and researched the concept in many aspects such as cyber resilience frameworks, strategies and metrics. However, many studies focus on one aspect of cyber resilience and overlook other parts. In this report we will address this problem and find a comprehensive solution for it.

This dissertation proposes two outcomes (a cyber resilience strategy and a technical architecture solution). The proposed cyber resilience strategy was approached by starting from the latest releases of NIST documents that provide the standards and the common area of the concept then finding the latest studies of the concept in the literature then critically review and analyze them for the purpose of finding their benefits and limitations. This analysis aims to leverage these benefits and fix those limitations to propose a comprehensive and solid strategy. Further, the proposed technical architecture aligns with the roposed strategy and together they achieve cyber resilience goals

The related works of this paper such as [1] and [12] had been leveraged heavily in proposing the strategy, those two papers provided the path to achieving the dissertation objectives.

The proposed strategy underwent thorough evaluations, and the result showed that the strategy was indeed able to fix the limitations of the previous studies by providing a holistic cyber resilience strategy, the strategy positively succeeded in the test by covering the four NISTidentified cyber resilience goals unlike he previous studies who underwent the same test and were found leaning toward concentrating on one or two aspects of cyber resilience.

Another test was conducted to the proposed technical architecture solution. The test was a technical test, and 3 attack scenarios were performed, the results showed that the solution was proven to provide withstandability and recoverability.

Furthermore, the proposed strategy and solution could leave an impact on our understanding of the concept and the importance of achieving the four NIST-defined goals.

Finally, this paper highlights the need for further study in cyber resilience metrics and cyber threats lifecycle and gives a starting point of a new cyber resilience metric.