Cyber‐physical technologies are prone to attacks in addition to faults and failures. The issue of protecting cyber‐physical systems should be tackled by jointly addressing security at both cyber and physical domains in order to promptly detect and mitigate cyber‐physical threats. Toward this end, this letter proposes a new architecture combining control‐theoretic solutions together with programmable networking techniques to jointly handle crucial threats to cyber‐physical systems. The architecture paves the way for new interesting techniques research directions and challenges which we discuss in our work