The Impact of Cyberworthiness on Corporate Organisations and Defence Organizations

Abstract

The growth of interconnected digital systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) has enlarged the cyber-attack surface of modern corporate and defence organisations. In this setting, cyberworthiness denotes a system's capacity to operate securely, reliably, and continuously under adversarial conditions. This thesis treats cyberworthiness as a multidimensional construct that extends beyond conventional cybersecurity by combining security and reliability with resilience, adaptability, and mission assurance across complex cyber-physical systems that support corporate operations and defence-relevant deployments. ​The thesis makes four contributions, each responding to a distinct organisational challenge. First, it presents a structured review of cyberworthiness standards, governance frameworks, and software assurance models, identifying fragmentation and the lack of automated, end-to-end assessment mechanisms. Second, it proposes a federated deep learning intrusion detection framework for privacy-preserving cyberworthiness assessment in distributed IoT environments; a four-layer architecture yields strong detection performance, cross-dataset generalisation, and improved communication efficiency. Third, it introduces CyberFND-Net, a dual-stream convolutional network for fake news detection that combines semantic and structural features with a Cyberworthiness-Aware Loss to reflect asymmetric operational risks, and reports superior results across multiple datasets. Fourth, it presents a six-dimensional Digital Twin architecture for IoT-enhanced combat systems that embeds cybersecurity as an intrinsic design dimension and demonstrates improved detection, lower latency, and substantial reductions in mean time to mitigation. Collectively, these contributions advance a coherent cyberworthiness agenda and provide empirically supported methods for improving security, resilience, and mission assurance in corporate and defence digital ecosystems.