This book presents the latest research in cognitive security, a rapidly emerging field that addresses the vulnerabilities in human behavior and cognition that can lead to Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) compromise. This book demonstrates that as adversaries increasingly use manipulative and deceptive information to disrupt human cognitive processes, including sensation, attention, memory, and mental operations, humans are misled into fallacious reasoning and manipulated decisions that can lead to system-level meltdown. Cognitive security aims to protect humans from the exploitation of cognitive vulnerabilities, help them make informed decisions that are free from manipulation and undue influence, and mitigate the aggravating risk in the ensuing steps of the attacker’s kill chain. This book offers solutions that work across different fields, such as psychology, neuroscience, data science, social science, and game theory, to deal with cognitive threats. It guides the reader through the core ideas with figures, real-life examples, and case studies. Moreover, it formally defines all research questions, presents the results using mathematical theorems and proofs, and obtains insights through numerical validation. This book provides a self-contained and brief overview of essential system-scientific tools for modeling, analyzing, and mitigating cognitive vulnerabilities. The concepts of human cognitive capacities and cognitive vulnerabilities are formally discussed, followed by two case studies in the scenarios of reactive and proactive attention vulnerabilities. This book provides insights and applications on this transdisciplinary topic, with the goal of motivating future research in this emerging area and pushing the frontier of human-technology convergence. This book is a valuable reference for researchers and advanced-level students studying or working in cognitive security and related fields. It is also useful for decision-makers, managers, and professionals working within these related fields.

This SpringerBrief presents a brief introduction to probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), followed by a discussion of abnormal event detection techniques in industrial control systems (ICS). It also provides an introduction to the use of game theory for the development of cyber-attack response models and a discussion on the experimental testbeds used for ICS cyber security research. The probabilistic risk assessment framework used by the nuclear industry provides a valid framework to understand the impacts of cyber-attacks in the physical world. An introduction to the PRA techniques such as fault trees, and event trees is provided along with a discussion on different levels of PRA and the application of PRA techniques in the context of cybersecurity. A discussion on machine learning based fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) methods and cyber-attack detection methods for industrial control systems are introduced in this book as well. A dynamic Bayesian networks based method that can be used to detect an abnormal event and classify it as either a component fault induced safety event or a cyber-attack is discussed. An introduction to the stochastic game formulation of the attacker-defender interaction in the context of cyber-attacks on industrial control systems to compute optimal response strategies is presented. Besides supporting cyber-attack response, the analysis based on the game model also supports the behavioral study of the defender and the attacker during a cyber-attack, and the results can then be used to analyze the risk to the system caused by a cyber-attack. A brief review of the current state of experimental testbeds used in ICS cybersecurity research and a comparison of the structures of various testbeds and the attack scenarios supported by those testbeds is included. A description of a testbed for nuclear power applications, followed by a discussion on the design of experiments that can be carried out on the testbed and the associated results is covered as well. This SpringerBrief is a useful resource tool for researchers working in the areas of cyber security for industrial control systems, energy systems and cyber physical systems. Advanced-level students that study these topics will also find this SpringerBrief useful as a study guide.