Resilient Critical Infrastructure Management using Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract—The SERSCIS project aims to support the use of interconnected systems of services in Critical Infrastructure (CI) applications. The problem of system interconnectedness is aptly demonstrated by ‘Airport Collaborative Decision Making’ (ACDM). Failure or underperformance of any of the interlinked ICT systems may compromise the ability of airports to plan their use of resources to sustain high levels of air traffic, or to provide accurate aircraft movement forecasts to the wider European air traffic management systems. The proposed solution is to introduce further SERSCIS ICT components to manage dependability and interdependency. These use semantic models of the critical infrastructure, including its ICT services, to identify faults and potential risks and to increase human awareness of them. Semantics allows information and services to be described in such a way that makes them understandable to computers. Thus when a failure (or a threat of failure) is detected, SERSCIS components can take action to manage the consequences, including changing the interdependency relationships between services. In some cases, the components will be able to take action autonomously — e.g. to manage ‘local’ issues such as the allocation of CPU time to maintain service performance, or the selection of services where there are redundant sources available. In other cases the components will alert human operators so they can take action instead. The goal of this paper is to describe a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can be used to address the management of ICT components and interdependencies in critical infrastructure systems. Index Terms—resilience; QoS; SOA; critical infrastructure, SLA

Towards a resilient networked service system

Large service systems today are of highly network structures. In this thesis, these large service systems are called networked service systems. The network nature of these systems has no doubt brought mass customized services but has also created challenges in the management of their safety. The safety of service systems is an important issue due to their critical influences on the functioning of society. Traditional safety engineering methods focus on maintaining service systems in a safe state, in particular aiming to maintain systems to be reliable and robust. However, resilience cannot be absent from safety out of many recent disasters that occur in society. The goal of this thesis is to improve the resilience of networked service systems. Four major works have been performed to achieve this goal. First, a unified definition of service systems was proposed and its relationship to other system concepts was unfolded. Upon the new definition, a domain model of service systems was established by a FCBPSS framework, followed by developing a computational model. Second, a definition of resilience for service systems was proposed, based on which the relationship among three safety properties (i.e., reliability, robustness and resilience) was clarified, followed by developing a framework for resilience analysis. Third, a methodology of resilience measurement for service systems was proposed by four measurement axioms along with corresponding mathematical models. The methodology focused on the potential ability of a service system to create optimal rebalancing solutions. Two typical service systems, transportation system and enterprise information system, were employed to validate the methodology. Fourth, a methodology of enhancing resilience for service systems was proposed by integrating three types of reconfigurations of systems, namely design, planning and management, along with the corresponding mathematical model. This methodology was validated by an example of transportation system. Several conclusions can be drawn from the work above: (1) a service system has a unique characteristic that it meets humans' demand directly, and its safety relies on the balance between the supplies and demands; (2) different from reliability and robustness, the resilience of a service system focuses on the rebalancing ability from imbalanced situations; (3) it makes sense to measure the resilience of a service system only for a particular imbalanced situation and based on evaluation of rebalancing solutions; and (4) integration of design, planning and management is an effective approach for improvement of the resilience for a service system. The contributions of this thesis can be summarized. Scientifically, this thesis work has improved our understanding of service systems and their resilience property; furthermore, this work has advanced the state of knowledge of safety science in particular having successfully responded to two questions: is a service system safe and how to make a service system safer? Technologically or methodologically, the work has advanced the knowledge for modeling and optimization of networked service systems in particular with multiple layer models along with the algorithms for integrated decision making on design, planning, and management

Critical Infrastructure Automated Immuno-Response System (CIAIRS)

Critical Infrastructures play a central role in the world around us and are the backbone of everyday life. Their service provision has become more widespread, to the point where it is now practically ubiquitous in many societies. Critical Infrastructure assets contribute to the economy and society as a whole. Their impact on the security, economy and health sector are extremely vital. Critical Infrastructures now possess levels of automation that require the integration of, often, mutually incompatible technologies. Their increasing complexity has led to the creation of direct and indirect interdependent connections amongst the infrastructure groupings. In addition, the data generated is vast as the intricate level of interdependency between infrastructures has grown. Since Critical Infrastructures are the backbone of everyday life, their protection from cyber-threats is an increasingly pressing issue for governments and private industries. Any failures, caused by cyber-attacks, have the ability to spread through interconnected systems and are a challenge to detect; especially as the Internet is now heavily reliant on Critical Infrastructures. This has led to different security threats facing interconnected security systems. Understanding the complexity of Critical Infrastructure interdependencies, how to take advantage of it in order to minimize the cascading problem, enables the prediction of potential problems before they happen. Therefore, this work firstly discusses the interdependency challenges facing Critical Infrastructures; and how it can be used to create a support network against cyber-attacks. In much, the same way as the human immune system is able to respond to intrusion. Next, the development of a distributed support system is presented. The system employs behaviour analysis techniques to support interconnected infrastructures and distribute security advice throughout a distributed system of systems. The approach put forward is tested through a statistical analysis methodology, in order to investigate the cascading failure effect whilst taking into account the independent variables. Moreover, our proposed system is able to detect cyber-attacks and share the knowledge with interconnected partners to create an immune system network. The development of the ‘Critical Infrastructure Auto-Immune Response System’ (CIAIRS) is presented with a detailed discussion on the main segments that comprise the framework and illustrates the functioning of the system. A semi-structured interview helped to demonstrate our approach by using a realistic simulation to construct data and evaluate the system output

Behavioural Observation for Critical Infrastructure Security Support

Critical infrastructures include sectors such as energy resources, finance, food and water distribution, health, manufacturing and government services. In recent years, critical infrastructures have become increasingly dependent on ICT; more interconnected and are often, as a result, linked to the Internet. Consequently, this makes these systems more vulnerable and increases the threat of cyber-attack. In addition, the growing use of wireless networks means that infrastructures can be more susceptible to a direct digital attack than ever before. Traditionally, protecting against environmental threats was the main focus of critical infrastructure preservation. Now, however, with the emergence of cyber-attacks, the focus has changed and infrastructures are facing a different danger with potentially debilitating consequences. Current security techniques are struggling to keep up to date with the sheer volume of innovative and emerging attacks; therefore, considering fresh and adaptive solutions to existing computer security approaches is crucial. The research presented in this thesis, details the use of behavioural observation for critical infrastructure security support. Our observer system monitors an infrastructure’s behaviour and detects abnormalities, which are the result of a cyber-attack taking place. By observing subtle changes in system behaviours, an additional level of support for critical infrastructure security is provided through a plug-in device, which operates autonomously and has no negative impact on data flow. Behaviour is evaluated using mathematical classifications to assess the data and detect changes. The subsequent results achieved during the data classification process were high and successful. Our observer approach was able to accurately classify 98.138 % of the normal and abnormal system behaviours produced by a simulation of a critical infrastructure, using nine data classifiers

Resilient Critical Infrastructure Management using Service Oriented Architecture: A Test Case using Airport Collaborative Decision Making

The SERSCIS approach aims to support the use of interconnected systems of services in Critical Infrastructure (CI) applications. The problem of system interconnectedness is aptly demonstrated by ‘Airport Collaborative Decision Making’ (A-CDM). Failure or underperformance of any of the interlinked ICT systems may compromise the ability of airports to plan their use of resources to sustain high levels of air traffic, or to provide accurate aircraft movement forecasts to the wider European air traffic management systems. The proposed solution is to introduce further SERSCIS ICT components to manage dependability and interdependency. These use semantic models of the critical infrastructure, including its ICT services, to identify faults and potential risks and to increase human awareness of them. Semantics allows information and services to be described in such a way that makes them understandable to computers. Thus when a failure (or a threat of failure) is detected, SERSCIS components can take action to manage the consequences, including changing the interdependency relationships between services. In some cases, the components will be able to take action autonomously — e.g. to manage ‘local’ issues such as the allocation of CPU time to maintain service performance, or the selection of services where there are redundant sources available. In other cases the components will alert human operators so they can take action instead. The goal of this paper is to describe a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can be used to address the management of ICT components and interdependencies in critical infrastructure systems