A Blockchain-Based Architecture for Enabling Cybersecurity in the Internet-of-Critical Infrastructures

Due to the drastic increase in the number of critical infrastructures like nuclear plants,industrial control systems(ICS),transportation,it becomes highly vulnerable to several attacks.They become the major targets of cyberattacks due to the increase in number of interconnections with other networks.Several research works have focused on the design of intrusion detection systems(IDS)using machine learning(ML)and deep learning(DL)models.At the same time,Blockchain(BC)technology can be applied to improve the security level.In order to resolve the security issues that exist in the critical infrastructures and ICS,this study designs a novel BC with deep learning empowered cyber-attack detection(BDLE-CAD)in critical infrastructures and ICS.The proposed BDLE-CAD technique aims to identify the existence of intrusions in the network.In addition,the presented enhanced chimp optimization based feature selection(ECOA-FS)technique is applied for the selection of optimal subset of features.Moreover,the optimal deep neural network(DNN)with search and rescue(SAR)optimizer is applied for the detection and classification of intrusions.Furthermore,a BC enabled integrity checking scheme(BEICS)has been presented to defend against the misrouting attacks.The experimental result analysis of the BDLE-CAD technique takes place and the results are inspected under varying aspects.The simulation analysis pointed out the supremacy of the BDLE-CAD technique over the recent state of art techniques with the accuy of 92.63%.

Development of an Analytical Model of the Process of Cybersecurity Protection of Distributed Information Systems of Critical Infrastructure

This article is dedicated to the creation of the analytical model of quantitative estimation of cybersecurity of Information Systems of Critical Infrastructure (ISCI). The model takes into consideration the existence, in the discussed ISCI, of both the intelligent tools of detection, analysis and identification of threats and vulnerabilities and means for restauration and elimination of their consequences. The development of the model also takes into consideration probabilistic nature of flow of events happening in ISCI and transferring the system between different states of cybersecurity. Among such probabilistic events we mean any operational perturbations (that can cause extreme situations) happening in ISCI under the influence of cyber-threats, as well as events concerning restoration and elimination of consequences of such cyber-threats. In this work, as methods of modelling, there have been used methods of system-oriented analysis based on theory of probability, theory of reliability and theory of queues. These methods enabled to describe analytically dependence of effectiveness indices of ISCI operation on abovementioned probabilistic processes.

Resilience at the Core: Critical Infrastructure Protection Challenges, Priorities and Cybersecurity Assessment Strategies

The importance of a nation’s infrastructure is a vital core for economic growth, development, and innovation. Health, wealth, access to education, public safety, and helping prepare for global crises like pandemics are all dependent on functioning and reliable infrastructures. In decades, the substantial threats affecting infrastructures globally whether in the form of extreme weather, Covid-19 pandemic, or the threats of state and non-state actors’ hackers, demanded urgency in building resilience infrastructures both during crises and in more stable conditions. At the same time, the adoption of emerging and innovative technologies boosts the development of the infrastructures using information, communication, and technology (ICT) platform. This shift accelerated its evolution toward digitization where interdependent and interconnected cyberspace demands collaborative and holistic strategies in protecting critical and high risks infrastructure assets from a growing number of disruptive cyberattacks. These ever-evolving cyber threats are creating increasingly dangerous and targeted cyberattacks to damage or disrupt the critical infrastructures delivering vital services to government, energy, healthcare, transportation, telecommunication, and other critical sectors. The infrastructure’s high risks assets present serious challenges and are crucial to safety, efficiency, and reliability. Any nation must recognize and determine how to cope with any type of threats to their critical infrastructure as well as the strategies to remain resilient. This article first describes the challenges and the need for critical infrastructure protection including the related global risks challenges. It then reviews the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States’ strategies, priorities, and urgencies of critical infrastructure protection. Subsequently, it surveys the critical infrastructure protection resilience strategies including ISO, IEC, ISA, NIST, CAF and CMM frameworks.

Flood cascading on critical infrastructure with climate change:A spatial analysis of the extreme weather event in Xinxiang,China

Floods caused by extreme weather events and climate change have increased in occurrence and severity all over the world,resulting in devastation and disruption of activities.Researchers and policy practitioners have increasingly paid attention to the role of critical infrastructure(CI)in disaster risk reduction,flood resilience and climate change adaptation in terms of its backbone functions in maintaining societal services in hazard attacks.The analysed city in this study,Xinxiang(Henan province,China),was affected by an extreme flood event that occurred on 17–23 July 2021,which caused great socio-economic losses.However,few studies have focused on medium-sized cities and the flood cascading effects on CI during this event.Therefore,this study explores the damages caused by this flooding event with links to CI,such as health services,energy supply stations,shelters and transport facilities(HEST infrastructure).To achieve this,the study first combines RGB(red,green blue)composition and supervised classification for flood detection to monitor and map flood inundation areas.Second,it manages a multiscenario simulation and evaluates the cascading effects on HEST infrastructure.Diverse open-source data are employed,including Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar(SAR)data and Landsat-8 OIL data,point-of-interest(POI)and OpenStreetMap(OSM)data.The study reveals that this extreme flood event has profoundly affected croplands and villagers.Due to the revisiting period of Sentinel-1 SAR data,four scenarios are simulated to portray the retreated but‘omitted’floodwater:Scenario 0 is the flood inundation area on 27 July,and Scenarios 1,2 and 3 are built based on this information with a buffer of 50,100 and 150 m outwards,respectively.In the four scenarios,as the inundation areas expand,the affected HEST infrastructure becomes more clustered at the centre of the core study area,indicating that those located in the urban centre are more susceptible to flooding.Furthermore,the affected transport facilities assemble in the north and east of the core study area,implying that transport facilities located in the north and east of the core study area are more susceptible to flooding.The verification of the flood inundation maps and affected HEST infrastructure in the scenario simulation support the series method adopted in this study.The findings of this study can be used by flood managers,urban planners and other decision makers to better understand extreme historic weather events in China,improve flood resilience and decrease the negative impacts of such events on HEST infrastructure.

Cascading effects of cyber-attacks on interconnected critical infrastructure

Modern critical infrastructure,such as a water treatment plant,water distribution system,and power grid,are representative of Cyber Physical Systems(CPSs)in which the physical processes are monitored and controlled in real time.One source of complexity in such systems is due to the intra-system interactions and inter-dependencies.Consequently,these systems are a potential target for attackers.When one or more of these infrastructure are attacked,the connected systems may also be affected due to potential cascading effects.In this paper,we report a study to investigate the cascading effects of cyber-attacks on two interdependent critical infrastructure namely,a Secure water treatment plant(SWaT)and a Water Distribution System(WADI).

Deriving invariant checkers for critical infrastructure using axiomatic design principles

Cyber-physical systems(CPSs)in critical infrastructure face serious threats of attack,motivating research into a wide variety of defence mechanisms such as those that monitor for violations of invariants,i.e.logical properties over sensor and actuator states that should always be true.Many approaches for identifying invariants attempt to do so automatically,typically using data logs,but these can miss valid system properties if relevant behaviours are not well-represented in the data.Furthermore,as the CPS is already built,resolving any design flaws or weak points identified through this process is costly.In this paper,we propose a systematic method for deriving invariants from an analysis of a CPS design,based on principles of the axiomatic design methodology from design science.Our method iteratively decomposes a high-level CPS design to identify sets of dependent design parameters(i.e.sensors and actuators),allowing for invariants and invariant checkers to be derived in parallel to the implementation of the system.We apply our method to the designs of two CPS testbeds,SWaT and WADI,deriving a suite of invariant checkers that are able to detect a variety of single-and multi-stage attacks without any false positives.Finally,we reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our approach,how it can be complemented by other defence mechanisms,and how it could help engineers to identify and resolve weak points in a design before the controllers of a CPS are implemented.

Water Resources and Water Services Infrastructure and Its Vulnerability to Extreme Events—The Case of Jordan

This study discussed the water sector as a critical infrastructural element in Jordan where the sector is exposed to the extreme events. The exposure of the country to extreme events has initiated this study. Such events are Pollution accidents, flooding, draughts, overexploitation, failure in electricity supply, climate changes, earthquakes, landslides, failure of dams, failure of wastewater treatment plants, failure of desalination plants, sabotage, fire, water theft, migration and demographic changes (immigration and urban migration), relations to neighboring countries, epidemics, and others. These extreme events are discussed in this article and the results show that failures in the water infrastructure and water supply, in Jordan, with its water sector situation have rigorous percussions on the country’s health, food supply, economy, societal stability, the built environment, and on other water-related issues. The study concludes that developing national programs to protect the water infrastructure in the water-fragile country has become very crucial to reach a robust and resilient water sector which not only means providing the inhabitants with quantitatively sufficient and qualitatively healthy water but also aims to incorporate guaranteeing social, economic and political stability.

Increasing Threats to United States of America Infrastructure Based on Cyber-Attacks

The United States of America faces an increasing number of threats to its critical infrastructure due to cyber-attacks. With the constant advancement of technology and the interconnectedness of various systems, the vulnerabilities in the nation’s infrastructure have become more pronounced. Cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure, such as power grids, transportation networks, and financial systems, pose a significant risk to national security and public safety. These attacks can disrupt essential services, cause economic losses, and potentially have severe consequences for the well-being of individuals and communities. The rise of cyber-terrorism is also a concern. Cyber-terrorists can exploit vulnerabilities in cyberspace to compromise infrastructure systems, causing chaos and panic among the population. The potential for destructive attacks on critical infrastructure is a pressing issue requiring constant attention and proactive measures.

Cyber Resilience through Real-Time Threat Analysis in Information Security

This paper examines how cybersecurity is developing and how it relates to more conventional information security. Although information security and cyber security are sometimes used synonymously, this study contends that they are not the same. The concept of cyber security is explored, which goes beyond protecting information resources to include a wider variety of assets, including people [1]. Protecting information assets is the main goal of traditional information security, with consideration to the human element and how people fit into the security process. On the other hand, cyber security adds a new level of complexity, as people might unintentionally contribute to or become targets of cyberattacks. This aspect presents moral questions since it is becoming more widely accepted that society has a duty to protect weaker members of society, including children [1]. The study emphasizes how important cyber security is on a larger scale, with many countries creating plans and laws to counteract cyberattacks. Nevertheless, a lot of these sources frequently neglect to define the differences or the relationship between information security and cyber security [1]. The paper focus on differentiating between cybersecurity and information security on a larger scale. The study also highlights other areas of cybersecurity which includes defending people, social norms, and vital infrastructure from threats that arise from online in addition to information and technology protection. It contends that ethical issues and the human factor are becoming more and more important in protecting assets in the digital age, and that cyber security is a paradigm shift in this regard [1].

Optimization Processes of Tangible and Intangible Networks through the Laplace Problems for Regular Lattices with Multiple Obstacles along the Way

A systematic approach is proposed to the theme of safety,reliability and global quality of complex networks(material and immaterial)by means of special mathematical tools that allow an adequate geometric characterization and study of the operation,even in the presence of multiple obstacles along the path.To that end,applying the theory of graphs to the problem under study and using a special mathematical model based on stochastic geometry,in this article we consider some regular lattices in which it is possible to schematize the elements of the network,with the fundamental cell with six,eight or 2(n+2)obstacles,calculating the probability of Laplace.In this way it is possible to measure the“degree of impedance”exerted by the anomalies along the network by the obstacles examined.The method can be extended to other regular and/or irregular geometric figures,whose union together constitutes the examined network,allowing to optimize the functioning of the complex system considered.

Cyber-physical System Security for Networked Industrial Processes

Cyber-physical systems(CPSs) are integrations of networks, computation and physical processes, where embedded computing devices continually sense, monitor, and control the physical processes through networks. Networked industrial processes combining internet, real-time computer control systems and industrial processes together are typical CPSs. With the increasingly frequent cyber-attack, security issues have gradually become key problems for CPSs. In this paper, a cyber-physical system security protection approach for networked industrial processes, i.e., industrial CPSs, is proposed. In this approach, attacks are handled layer by layer from general information technology(IT) security protection, to active protection, then to intrusion tolerance and physical security protection. The intrusion tolerance implemented in real-time control systems is the most critical layer because the real time control system directly affects the physical layer. This novel intrusion tolerance scheme with a closed loop defense framework takes into account the special requirements of industrial CPSs. To illustrate the effectiveness of the CPS security protection approach, a networked water level control system is described as a case study in the architecture analysis and design language(AADL) environment. Simulation results show that 3 types of injected attacks can be quickly defended by using the proposed protection approach.

System resilience enhancement: Smart grid and beyond

Boosting the resilience of power systems is a core requirement of smart grids. In fact, resilience enhancement is crucial to all critical infrastructure systems.In this study, we review the current research on system resilience enhancement within and beyond smart grids. In addition, we elaborate on resilience definition and resilience quantification and discuss several challenges and opportunities for system resilience enhancement. This study aims to deepen our understanding of the concept of resilience and develop a wide perspective on enhancing the system resilience for critical infrastructures.

Supporting decision-making processes for selecting fire safety measures for road tunnels

Selecting fires safety measures for road tunnels relies mainly on strict regulatory requirements. However, the choice should also be based on many different criteria and ranking of alternatives should take place. Existing methods exhibit lack in dealing rigorously with measures’ selection amongst different alternatives. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing a novel method, named EVADE, which aims to incorporate diverse stakeholders’ views and provide a meaningful ranking of alternatives.To do so, it estimates the tunnel level of safety taking into account only any standard measures existing. Subsequently, the performance of additional measures is examined.Then, a list of the most significant criteria that are valuable to judge the appropriateness of selected measures is introduced. The relative importance amongst the decision criteria is calculated through the Analytic Hierarchy Process, based on the expert opinion. Sensitivity analysis through Monte Carlo simulation is embedded to allow for a meaningful prioritization of the decision criteria. Thus, the alternatives’ ranking comes as a distribution instead of a single number, providing the decision-maker richer information for selecting the most suitable measure(s) according to the specific tunnel situation. At last, a typical tunnel is examined to showcase the utilization of the method.

Percolation-based health management of complex traffic systems

System health management,which aims to ensure the safe and efficient operation of systems by reducing uncertain risks and cascading failures during their lifetime,is proposed for complex transportation systems and other critical infrastructures,especially under the background of the New Infrastructure Projects launched in China.Previous studies proposed numerous approaches to evaluate or improve traffic reliability or efficiency.Nevertheless,most existing studies neglected the core failure mechanism(i.e.,spatio-temporal propagation of traffic congestion).In this article,we review existing studies on traffic reliability management and propose a health management framework covering the entire traffic congestion lifetime,from emergence,evolution to dissipation,based on the study of core failure modes with percolation theory.Aiming to be"reliable,invulnerable,resilient,potential,and active",our proposed traffic health management framework includes modeling,evaluation,diagnosis,and improvement.Our proposed framework may shed light on traffic management for megacities and urban agglomerations around the world.This new approach may offer innovative insights for systems science and engineering in fiiture intelligent infrastructure management.

Multi-Agent Based Stochastic Dynamical Model to Measure Community Resilience

Emergency services and utilities need appropriate planning tools to analyze and improve infrastructure and community resilience to disasters.Recognized as a key metric of community resilience is the social well-being of a community during a disaster,which is made up of mental and physical social health.Other factors influencing community resilience directly or indirectly are emotional health,emergency services,and the availability of critical infrastructures services,such as food,agriculture,water,transportation,electric power,and communications system.It turns out that in computational social science literature dealing with community resilience,the role of these critical infrastructures along with some important social characteristics is not considered.To address these weaknesses,we develop a new multi-agent based stochastic dynamical model,standardized by overview,design concepts,details,and decision(ODD+D)protocol and derived from neuro-science,psychological and social sciences,to measure community resilience in terms of mental and physical well-being.Using this model,we analyze the micro-macro level dependence between the emergency services and power systems and social characteristics such as fear,risk perception,informationseeking behaviour,cooperation,flexibility,empathy,and experience,in an artificial society.Furthermore,we simulate this model in two case studies and show that a high level of flexibility,experience,and cooperation enhances community resilience.Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

Offshore system safety and operational challenges in harsh Arctic operations

Offshore oil and gas drilling operations are going to remote and harsh arctic environments with demands forheightened safety and resilience of operational facilities. The remote and harsh environment is characterized byextreme waves, wind, storms, currents, ice, and fog that hinder drilling operations and cause structural failuresof critical offshore infrastructures. The risk, safety, reliability, and integrity challenges in harsh environment operations are critically high, and a comprehensive understanding of these factors will aid operations and protectthe investment. The dynamics, environmental constraints, and the associated risk of the critical offshore infrastructures for safe design, installation, and operations are reviewed to identify the current state of knowledge.This paper introduces a systematic review of harsh environment characterization by exploring the metoceanphenomena prevalent in harsh environments and their effects on the floating offshore structures performanceand supporting systems. The dynamics of the floating systems are described by their six degrees of freedom andtheir associated risk scenarios. The systematic methodology further explores the qualitative, quantitative, andconsequences modeling techniques for risk analysis of floating offshore systems in a harsh environment. Whilepresenting the current state of knowledge, the study also emphasizes a way forward for sustainable offshore operations. The study shows that the current state of knowledge is inexhaustive and will require further researchto develop a design that minimizes interruption during remote harsh offshore operations. Resilient innovation,IoT and digitalization provide opportunities to fill some of the challenges of remote Arctic offshore operations.