Architecture for Community-scale Critical Infrastructure Coordination for Security and Resilience

Abstract: Our Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems are, by definition, critical to the safe and proper functioning of society. Nearly all of these systems utilize industrial Process Control Systems (PCS) to provide clean water, reliable electricity, critical manufacturing, and many other services within our communities - yet most of these PCS incorporate very little cyber-security countermeasures. Cyber-attacks on CI are becoming an attractive target. While many vendor solutions are starting to be deployed at CI sites, these solutions are largely based on network monitoring for intrusion detection. As such, they are not process-aware, nor do they account for inter dependencies among other CI sites in their community. What is proposed is an architecture for coordinating all CI within a community, which defines characteristics to enhance its integration, its resilience to failure and attack, and its ultimate acceptance by CI operators.