InfraStress addressed resilience and cyber-physical (C/P) security of Sensitive Industrial Plants and Sites (SIPS) Critical Infrastructure (CI) to improve resilience and protection capabilities of SIPS exposed to large scale, combined, C/P threats and hazards, and guarantee continuity of operations, while minimising cascading effects in the infrastructure itself, the environment, other CIs, and citizens in vicinity, at reasonable cost. InfraStress involved 27 partners of excellence from 11 countries with very cross-cutting and complementary competences and excellent track records, including 5 SIPS operators who successfully conducted real-world piloting and validation activities.
Today, the term “Critical Infrastructure” is well known not only to security experts and researchers, but also to European citizens and professionals from many different fields. Threats and reported attacks to Critical Infrastructure have recently made it into several headlines in mainstream news.
Currently, most Industrial Critical Infrastructure (the SIPS mainly addressed in InfraStress), have high levels of safety. At the same time, the rise of the 'digital everywhere' paradigm (think of how we use our smartphones for almost anything, how our cars have an on-board computer or our houses are protected by an electronic alarm system), poses new challenges. The COVID pandemic, with a dramatic increase of remote work (and 'remote everything) has pushed such 'digital everywhere' even more. Therefore, the borderline between physical and cyber security is thinner and thinner and with so many digital systems and technology driving industrial plants and related infrastructure there is an increased risk of complex, mixed security threats.
In terms of social impacts, industrial CIs like SIPS (and potential attacks or disruptions) have a strong routing in social communities under various socio-economic aspects including in terms of health and environment, jobs, interconnection with other CIs. Protecting SIPS, as InfraStress aims to, means protecting the communities living around those SIPS, in some cases even very large and populated communities. From a social point of view InfraStress is also addressing citizen and civil society involvement, with the aim of promoting a culture of shared collaboration, participation, and trust in the protection of CI.
The InfraStress value proposition is to improve the security and resilience of Sensitive Industrial Plants and Sites (SIPS) and overcoming a ‘silo approach’ related to physical and cyber security. In order to overcome this ‘monochromatic vision’ approach and provide adequate tools to SIPS we decided to give a leading role to our user partners: in fact, the InfraStress solutions are being tested in 5 different Pilot scenarios embracing a representative sample of European SIPS Critical Infrastructure.
Therefore the InfraStress strategic objectives have been to:
- Improve the resilience and the protection capabilities of Sensitive Industrial Plants and Sites (SIPS) exposed to large-scale, combined, cyber-physical threats and hazards
- Guarantee continuity of operations, while minimising cascading effects in the infrastructure itself, the environment, other Critical Infrastructures (CIs), and the citizens in vicinity, at reasonable cost
- Improve the resilience of single SIPS, through an adaptive, flexible, and customisation set of innovative and configurable security measures and tools.
- Enable effective collaboration among SIPS operators, in order to impede the propagation of cascading effects.
- Deliver an open Framework that allows future evolution to easily integrate additional detection technologies, data feeds, analysis and decision support services, and most importantly to effectively integrate existing solutions already deployed at the SIPS CI side.
- Enable full exploitation of the technological innovation potential by supporting a culture of EU SIPS Critical Infrastructure Protection and implementing a human-centric approach, that effectively combines decision support and human expertise.
