Research Area: CyberSecurity
The work presented in this thesis applies modelling and simulation techniques in order to improve the security and resilience of cyber-physical systems. This is achieved through the context of three major categories of cyber-physical systems: Critical Infrastructure – Industrial Control Systems (CI-ICSs), Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs) and Hot-Desking Systems (HDS). The selection of these categories lies in the fact that they are used in many critical cases and often with only small changes from one case to another. For each one of these categories, some reference use cases are selected and then modelling and simulation techniques are applied on them in order for their security and/or resilience perspective to be improved.
The set of tools that are used for the aforementioned modelling and simulation, consists of Game Theory, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), Epidemiology, SensomaX (a custom-made agent-based middleware), Monte Carlo predictive modelling and Event-Driven Simulation (EDS) and in every use case, one or more of them in combination are used. The presented techniques manage to tackle the issues identified in existing approaches while addressing the stated research questions and they ultimately, introduce a new way of Systems Thinking.
More specifically, in terms of the three aforementioned categories (CI-ICSs, WSNs and HDS), this thesis includes models that use Game Theory (GT), Viable System Modelling (VSM), Monte Carlo predictive modelling and epidemiology techniques in order to improve the cyber security risk management procedure in ICSs, applications of GT and auction-based algorithms, EDS and SensomaX in order to suggest solutions that improve WSNs both from a security and a resilience perspective and finally, approaches that use EDS in order to apply a HDS that can improve the productivity of an enterprise.
Name of the Researcher: Konstantinos Maraslis
Name of the Supervisor(s): Theo Tryfonas, George Oikonomou
Year of Completion: 2019
University: The University of Bristol
Thesis Link: Home Page Url
