Measuring Stakeholder Alignment to Overcome Control System Cyber Vulnerability

ABSTRACT Disagreement exists among professionals due to variances in engineering practice, paradigms, processes, and culture. Understanding the whole picture and what can improve things is a continuous science and engineering challenge. This challenge holds particularly true for systems that control the physical world, such as power systems that oversee occupational health and safety issue resources—stakeholder disagreement results in measurable misalignment that leads to vulnerability. The vulnerability induced by stakeholder misalignment may be greater than any innate system design vulnerability. It is possible to measure the uncertainty of agreement through statistical analysis and use an analytical model to identify pain points where different sets of stakeholders disagree. The same measure can assess stakeholder sources beginning with a vulnerability assessment to help drive better alignment and, eventually, agreement. It is the disagreement that ends up in vulnerability. This paper describes the analytic model and methodology as a new means of assessing uncertainty and interpreting Likert scores to overcome control system cybersecurity vulnerability.