Digital Guardians: The Past and The Future of Cyber-Physical Resilience

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 15 Apr 2026] Digital Guardians: The Past and The Future of Cyber-Physical Resilience Saurabh Bagchi, Hyunseung Kim, Tarek Abdelzaher, Homa Alemzadeh, Somali Chaterji, Glen Chou, Yuying Duan, Fanxin Kong, Michael Lemmon, Yin Li, Mengyu Liu, Wenhao Luo, Meiyi Ma, Sibin Mohan, Ayan Mukhopadhyay, Melkior Ornik, Dimitra Panagou, Kristin Yvonne Rozier, Ivan Ruchkin, Huajie Shao, Sze Zheng Yong, Majid Zamani, Xugui Zhou Resilience in cyber-physical systems (CPS) is the fundamental ability to maintain safety and critical functionality despite adverse "perturbations," which includes security attacks, environmental disruptions, and hardware or software failures. This survey provides a comprehensive review of CPS resilience, framing the field through five interconnected themes that are required in an integrated whole to achieve real-world resilience. The article first posits that resilience is a system-wide property emerging from interactions between hardware, software, and human users. Second, it addresses the challenges of learning-enabled CPS, which often operate in data-scarce environments characterized by imbalanced or noisy data, requiring innovative solutions like synthetic data generation and foundation model adaptation. Third, the survey examines proactive measures for resilience, which include distinctive aspects of verification, testing, and redundancy. Fourth, it explores recovery mechanisms, moving beyond traditional fault models to design "just good enough" recovery strategies that prioritize safety-critical functions during perturbations. Finally, it highlights the central role of the human, focusing on the different levels of human intervention, the necessity of trust calibration, and the requirement for explainable AI to support human-CPS teaming. These themes are illustrated through representative application domains, primarily Connected and Autonomous Transportation Systems (CATS) and Medical CPS (MCPS). By integrating the five interconnected themes, this survey provides a systematic roadmap for achieving the resilient CPS in increasingly complex and adversarial environments. Comments: Submitted to ACM CSUR; 32 pages + 10 pages of references Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Systems and Control (eess.SY) Cite as: arXiv:2604.14360 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.14360v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.14360 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Saurabh Bagchi [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:23:40 UTC (2,761 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.DC cs.SY eess eess.SY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)