To become truly cyber resilient, you must architect the organization to prepare for the "unknown."

Francesco Chiarini

cyber resilience architecture

 Five strategic pillars of cyber resilience find relevance in the way systems are architected. These concepts are well articulated NIST 800-160 [1].
 
  1. Limited organizational resources must be allocated where they can provide the greatest benefit. This results in a strategy of focusing first on critical assets and ensuring our environment is designed to favor defensive operations, limit attackers, and avoid saturation of response capabilities. 
  2. The threat landscape changes as adversaries evolve, but so do an organization's technology footprint and relevant processes. Agility and adaptability are essential components of the risk management strategy, which should be designed to accommodate the assumption that unexpected changes in the threat, technical, and operational environments will occur throughout the system’s lifespan.
  3. Defending a large attack surface is challenging and necessitates continuous efforts to monitor, analyze, and respond to anomalies. Reducing the attack surface lowers the costs associated with protection, and adversaries are forced to focus their efforts on a smaller set of locations, resources, or environments, which can be monitored and defended more effectively. Additionally, disrupting the attack surface is crucial to impede adversaries from gaining a foothold.
  4. Systems and system components, ranging from chips to software/running services, can be compromised for extended periods without detection. Some compromises may never be detected. Across all levels of abstraction, systems must be designed to meet minimum performance and quality requirements across all operational states.
  5. Sophisticated cyber adversaries dedicate time, effort, and resources to crafting and enhancing their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). They adapt based on emerging technologies, new applications of existing technologies, and insights gained from understanding the TTPs of defenders. Moreover, the tools developed by these advanced adversaries quickly become accessible to less skilled attackers. Consequently, systems and missions must maintain resilience against unforeseen attacks.

References:
[1] Developing Cyber-Resilient Systems: A Systems Security Engineering Approach, NIST SP 800-160 Vol. 2
Search