Optimization of Cyber System Survivability Under Attacks Using Redundancy of Components

In this paper, we consider a mission critical system (MCS) that is meant to serve a mission for a certain time while facing cyber attacks launched against it. We propose a mission critical system that employs component redundancy under a prescribed budget constraint to maximize the system’s survivability during a specific mission time with attacks against the system modeled as a stochastic process. To determine the optimal set of system components, we provide an efficient algorithm to solve the system survivability optimization problem along with comprehensive case studies and analysis. Simulation results are provided that show the advantage of using redundancy of components in optimizing the survivability of cyber systems under attacks. The proposed work can help the MCS designers to optimally utilize the component redundancy under a cost constraint for many crucial applications, such as military systems.