Intrusion response systems for cyber-physical systems: A comprehensive survey

Cyberattacks on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are on the rise due to CPS increased networked connectivity and may cause costly environmental hazards as well as human and financial loss. This necessitates designing and implementing proper automatic cybersecurity defensive mechanisms to protect CPS from cyberattacks. This paper studies and surveys Intrusion Response Systems (IRS) by considering their taxonomy, countermeasures pool, general architecture, and the different decision-making approaches utilized in the literature to build resilient CPS that can maintain a safe and stable operational behaviour and minimize the effect of cyberattacks. Recent new advances using Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for IRS designs are also surveyed and discussed. Additionally, the paper highlights open research questions and sketches directions for future work.