2025/12/30 by Eugene Levner, Dmitry Tsadikovich
Engineering · Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · #Smart Grid Security and Resilience #Supply Chain Resilience and Risk Management #Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
paper · doi:10.1080/00207543.2025.2608292
Cyber-physical supply chains (CPSCs) integrate physical assets with cyber technologies to form connected and intelligent ecosystems. The increasing frequency and sophistication of cyber-attacks on CPSCs have made defence against these threats increasingly complex. A key strategy in this direction is to identify vulnerable attack paths to detect the most endangered components in the CPSC, thereby allowing the development of more effective and attack-resistant countermeasures. We begin by presenting generalised attack graphs with AND, OR, and QUORUM nodes (so-called AOQ graphs), using them to model and counter attacks on CPSC. Then, we develop an efficient path-extraction method that exploits supply chains’ structural dynamics and reconfigurability to find vulnerable attack paths in AOQ graphs. Finally, we reconstruct the most vulnerable paths by hardening components and deploying an innovative honeypot technology – this is a decoy system that imitates assets to distract attackers. Unlike known methods, the proposed methodology automatically extracts the most vulnerable attack paths from the AOQ graphs in polynomial time without human intervention and provides proactive defence against intrusions. This approach has been tested on experimental benchmark problems and a real post-harvest supply chain and has demonstrated its superiority over previously known pathfinding algorithms.