Giordano Vicoli

Safeguarding information intensive critical infrastructures against novel types of emerging failures

Abstract The complexity of information intensive critical infrastructures, like electricity networks, telecommunication networks and public transportation networks is today augmented much more than in the past: such complexity augments the number of possible failures and anomalous working conditions and consequently decreases the survivability of the infrastructures. In this paper, the possibility is investigated to detect early anomalies and failures inside information intensive critical infrastructures by the introduction of anomaly detectors being “self-aware” about the normal working conditions of the infrastructure itself. This approach has the objective to improve the performance of the most popular signature-based algorithms for intrusion detection, and makes use of different classes of time-oriented algorithms based on artificial intelligence paradigm. It has the advantage to work also in presence of unknown and unexpected types of attacks or failures. The tests, to evaluate the performance of the utilised detectors, are executed inside an emulated supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system of an electrical power transmission grid, and a proposal for the future integration inside real SCADA systems is also reported.

Analysing interdependencies of critical infrastructures using agent discrete event simulation

The paper explores the possibility of using interacting agents for modelling and discrete event simulation as a tool to approach interdependencies analysis and evaluation for critical infrastructures. A discrete event simulation system was developed, using agent-oriented programming, considering the following limited sets of critical infrastructures: a great hospital infrastructure, a railway transportation infrastructure and other public transportation infrastructures. Faults inside the electricity distribution system are simulated, producing electrical power outages whose duration could be variable with respect to time and space, and generating consequences inside the transportation infrastructures. The hospital infrastructure users, such as different types of physicians, nurses, subsidiary personnel, students and patients are also modelled using agent oriented architectures. The objective of the simulations is to study and analyse the interdependencies of the considered infrastructures Many typologies of test scenarios are also executed and the severity of the generated consequences are analysed in the paper.

Dependability and Survivability of Large Complex Critical Infrastructures

This paper refers to research activities related to SAFEGUARD project (IST Project Number: IST-2001-32685). The aims of the project is to examine LCCI’s in terms of nature of different facets in each infrastructure: organizational, computational (cyber) and physical layers. Critical inter-dependencies among layers can thus be analyzed. Possible impact of bad events, early classified in attack scenarios with and without SAFEGUARD, will be coped with countermeasures to maintain at acceptable level system’s operability. SAFEGUARD, an agent-based middleware, is conceived to operate embedded inside of the cyber-layers, the more sensitive part to malicious attacks and anomalies, and is designed to enhance dependability and survivability of a LCCI. Self-healing mechanism of SAFEGUARD agents will start with the trouble diagnosis and classification using Hybrid Intrusion Detection techniques (software instrumentation, novelty detection, etc.). Once the problem has been diagnosed, a number of techniques will be used to solve and repair the fault (i.e.: adaptive middleware technology, backup, hot standby and so on). More self-healing mechanisms will have to be combined and coordinated to with an attempt to deal with the source of the problem.

A Middleware Improved Technology (MIT) to Mitigate Interdependencies between Critical Infrastructures

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A Gamified Approach to Participatory Modelling of Water System Risks

Modelling risks related to critical infrastructures requires integrated and multi disciplinary competencies of experts, stakeholders, and users who are often located in different places and have limited time to be involved in a strenuous knowledge elicitation project. In this context we propose a gamified and participatory modelling approach to boost engagement of people involved in risk assessment related to critical infrastructures. The approach is supported by a risk management system based on the ICE-CREAM framework, including the CREAM (CREAtivity Machine) software for computational creativity and the ICE (Innovation through Collaborative Environment) mobile app developed for iOS. Insights on risk assessment of water systems are also discussed.

A Rule-based Approach for Modelling Behaviour in Crisis and Emergency Scenarios

Crisis management is a critical task requiring a deep knowledge of the related scenario where usually interoperability and collaboration among different services and actors take place. To support crisis management a promising approach is based on simulation and analysis. Precondition to them is the possibility to model both structural and behavioural aspects of the addressed domain. In a previous paper we presented the CEML domain specific language to model structural aspects of a crisis scenario. Here we focus on behavioural aspects and we present the CEML behavioural modeling framework to model them. This framework consists of the CEML language and an incremental method to specify behaviour based on the stimulus-response model, the event-condition-action rules, and the Reaction RuleML language.