I presented this session at SecurityWeek’s ICS Cybersecurity Conference on October 7, 2026. Thank you to SecurityWeek for hosting and to everyone I met in Nashville.
Session abstract
Consequence-driven Cyber-informed Engineering is Idaho National Laboratory’s methodology for working backwards from a high-consequence event. It asks how an adversary could cause that outcome through cyber means.
CCE assumes breach. The aim is to identify engineered protections and operating procedures that can prevent the chosen consequence, even when a control system is compromised.
What the session does
The session runs an accelerated CCE tabletop on a representative ICS system chosen by the room from a curated list. The exercise covers Phase 1, consequence prioritization, and Phase 2, system-of-systems analysis. We map physical failure modes and the cyber paths that could trigger them.
The group marks choke points and candidate engineered protections on a functional block diagram.
Using the diagram
The diagram records system dependencies and attack paths. We use it to discuss proposed engineering changes and their cost. The same information can inform later design reviews or penetration-test planning.
The analysis also covers closed-source vendor devices whose internals are difficult to inspect.