Modern critical infrastructures, specifically Critical Energy Infrastructures (CEI), are increasingly turning into distributed, complex Cyber-Physical systems that need proactive protection and fast restoration to mitigate physical or cyber incidents or attacks, and most importantly combined cyber-physical attacks, which are much more challenging and it is expected to become the most intrusive attack. As a result, a joint cyber-physical approach based on the following principles to manage CEI security becomes necessary to maximize security:
• CEI infrastructure needs to be treated as a distributed, large scale Cyber-Physical System (CPS) for combined physical and cyber security threat detection modelling and mitigation strategies;
• CEI security integrates human and social characteristics, moving towards a Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS) model of protection, including the Human-In-the-Loop (HITL) concept to build a Culture of CEI security;
• Each site and each segment of the CEI needs specialized attack prevention measures and incident mitigation to return to normal operation, especially if cost is taken into account.
Overall objectives are:
1. Analyse exiting CEI threats and risks and create a methodology for predicting new/yet unknown risks based on the development of key metrics to better identify and characterize threats and threat scenarios and to describe relative security posture before and after deployment of security solution. Moreover, create a methodology and a tool for the quantification of the trustworthiness and the categorization of CEI assets, systems and segments, and “system of systems” in to CEI Secure Tiers, taking into account availability, redundancy, resilience and survivability.
2. Study, analyse and validate key design objectives, namely CEI Security Lifecycle Assessment, Resilience, CEI Survivability and CEI Data Privacy during extensive evaluations and fine tuning, emulating real abnormal conditions and malicious incidents. The theoretical and analytical work contributes to define preventive measures to reduce risk by design and pave the way for next generation CEI security.
3. Develop methodologies and interfaces for gaining CEI situation awareness, perception and comprehension. APIs have been developed for interfacing and fusing information from state-of-the-art physical and cyber sensors as well as metering devices and specialised HITL applications.
4. Design and develop a Cyber Physical Social System co-simulator that models and simulates CEI situation environment and threats models.
5. Develop a dashboard and a mobile app for implementing innovative, trusted and traceable, bidirectional information flows, between CEI and HITL. The tools are based on blockchains technology and will be used by HITL, acting as front-line responders, to inform CEI operators on potential abnormal incidents and by CEI operators for informing humans in vicinity for potential de-escalation actions in case of an accident or attack.
6. Design and implement a dynamic countermeasures toolbox and a Decision Support System aimed at physical and cyber attack mitigation, including CEI infrastructure (self-) healing and drones’ neutralization.
7. Design and implement a CEI Incidents Information Sharing Platform as distributed repository of information sharing among CEI operators and countermeasures. The system starts from the SUCCESS Critical Infrastructures Security Operational Centre (CI-SOC), but it is extended to facilitate collaboration among various CEI operators throughout Europe.
