Cyber-Physical Systems Forensics

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) provide beneficial connections between the physical world (systems, environments, and humans) and the cyber world. They offer smart features for improving the physical world such as enhancing and optimizing reliability, quality, safety, health, security, efficiency, operational costs, and maintainability of a specific physical system or environment. CPS are implemented with a set of distributed software and hardware components that are embedded in physical systems and environments or attached to humans. Many CPS applications are being implemented for a variety of applications. However, CPS are vulnerable to hacking attempts and criminal activities as any other computerized and distributed system. As a result, CPS must incorporate security measures in addition to suitable forensics capabilities that could support investigations of any hacking attempts or criminal activities. This paper defines and discusses the emerging area of CPS forensics, highlights its issues, and reviews some proposed approaches. In addition, it discusses future research and development directions in this area.