XPhysICS is a threat‑reuse framework for industrial control systems (ICS) that maps a documented threat from one plant to the cyber‑physical context of another. The method separates analyst‑driven source abstraction—vocabulary and schema—from deterministic grounding on a target‑conditioned, machine‑validated contract. Candidate mappings are screened by five eligibility criteria: role compatibility, implemented type compatibility, stage coherence, slice viability, and rule‑surface applicability. Corresponding evidence layers are grounding acceptance, slice adequacy, dynamic realizability, consumer applicability, and consumer outcome. We evaluated 83 structured source‑threat abstractions across water‑treatment, water‑distribution, hydro/water‑energy, and chemical‑process targets. Controlled target‑side studies for SWaT→water‑treatment and WADI→water‑distribution produced clean, nominal‑confounded, and near‑threshold consumer outcomes; nine Hydro/GRFICS cases further demonstrated bounded validation‑slice execution. Additional experiments covered bounded predictive, state‑aware, and phase‑aware consumer lanes, the unmodified upstream GeCo implementation, and a paper‑derived reproduction of a physics‑guided search over three frozen groundings. Results indicate that cross‑domain ICS threat reuse requires traceable source semantics, explicit target‑conditioned grounding criteria, and careful separation of subsequent target‑side evidence.
Review: XPhysICS decouples threat abstraction from target validation, offering a systematic cross‑domain grounding workflow that makes reuse of industrial control system threats both verifiable and reproducible.