As our world becomes more digitized, we face rising challenges with the resilience of increasingly interconnected digital and physical systems across

PCAST Initiating Working Group on Cyber-Physical Resilience

submited by

Style Pass

2023-04-01 22:00:18

As our world becomes more digitized, we face rising challenges with the resilience of increasingly interconnected digital and physical systems across our businesses, public services, critical infrastructure, and government institutions. The tightly coupled inter-dependencies among physical and digital components in systems can lead to high levels of “brittleness,” when even minor disruptions lead to wide-scale and unpredictable effects.

The digitization of all aspects of society has made us all dependent on complex and often fragile cyber-physical systems that can easily break down or suffer from cyber-attacks, software glitches, supply chain problems, mechanical failures, natural disasters, or other disruptions. These breakdowns or attacks can have serious and unpredictable consequences for many sectors, such as banking, energy, transportation, and health care.

Events or attacks in one part of one system can have ripple effects leading to banking outages, oil pipeline failures, ground-stops of whole fleets of aircraft, and disruption of medical facilities with devastating outcomes, to name just a few possibilities. In each situation, the common response to failures or rising concerns is often to try and make specific components more reliable, better defended, and more tightly regulated in the hope that system-wide resilience improves. (For instance, a focus of attention might be to patch cyber-hacking vulnerability or to provide backup power capabilities.) Paradoxically, this is often only temporarily helpful because more dependencies are created around specific components that people now think are more trustworthy. Unfortunately, deeper reliance on one component often decreases system-wide resilience, and for each subsequent attack or failure, our answer is to “turn the screw” even harder by reinforcing the last element that failed. As a result, we are creating an increasingly fragile society where the overall systems we rely on can become ever more brittle.