Measures of Resilience to Cyber Contagion -- An Axiomatic Approach for Complex Systems

We introduce a novel class of risk measures for the management of systemic risk in networks. In contrast to most existing approaches, our measures target the topological structure of the network in order to control the risk of a pandemic spread of some contagious peril throughout the network. While the main discussion of the paper is tailored to the management of systemic cyber risk in digital networks, we also draw parallels to similar risk management frameworks for other types of complex systems.