Unbounded impacts and risk mitigation in billing infrastructures
by Fabrizio Baiardi, Claudio Telmon, Daniele Sgandurra
International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management (IJRAM), Vol. 15, No. 2/3, 2011

Abstract: A billing infrastructure is an information and communications technology system that bills a set of customers for some service they access. We discuss how the minimisation of the infrastructure cost may introduce components that are points of catastrophic failure in a security perspective because successful attacks against these components result in a full control of the infrastructure. We describe a classification of both attacks and threats and a mathematical model of attack impacts to prove that the introduction of points of catastrophic failure result in a heavy-tailed probability distribution of impacts. A heavy-tailed distribution has several implications on risk management because the probability of very large impacts may not be neglected and countermeasures cannot be selected according to their cost effectiveness because even the most expensive ones are convenient. For these reasons, risk management should introduce redundant components with a decentralised control to increase resilience and minimise attack impacts.

Online publication date: Sat, 28-Feb-2015

The full text of this article is only available to individual subscribers or to users at subscribing institutions.

 
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.

Pay per view:
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.

Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management (IJRAM):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:

    Username:        Password:         

Forgotten your password?


Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.

If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com