Regional Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

This chapter opens the last, fourth, part of our book. In this part, we explore several cases where cyber resilience was addressed – from different perspectives – in application to complex systems or networks. We collected these cases to answer the question of a practically minded reader, “How do I approach assessing of enhancing resilience of a particular system I am interested in?” While these few cases cannot cover all possible classes of systems or networks, they serve as useful illustrative examples and could inform approaches to resilience in other classes of systems.

The opening chapter of this part discusses large-scale, highly complex web of systems called regional critical infrastructure. These are responsible for providing entire large regions (the size of states or countries) with water, electricity, natural gas, communications, transportation, healthcare, police, fire protection, and ambulances. Often, these are further complicated by multiple, not always fully cooperative owners of these systems, and by the diversity of threats that may attack such systems, ranging from natural disasters to state-sponsored cyber attackers. The chapter focuses mainly on particular cyber resiliency assessment (CRA) methodology. The foundations of the methodology are collective assessments by human stakeholders and experts, seeking areas of concerns and developing options for resilience enhancements. CRA involves analytical and modeling techniques for cyber assessments. The chapter illustrates the application of CRA to a regional critical infrastructure with a realistic case study.