Title: The CRUTIAL reference critical information infrastructure architecture: a blueprint

Authors: Paulo Verissimo, Nuno Ferreira Neves, Miguel Correia

Addresses: University of Lisboa, Faculty of Sciences, Bloco C6, Campo Grande, Lisboa 1749-016, Portugal. ' University of Lisboa, Faculty of Sciences, Bloco C6, Campo Grande, Lisboa 1749-016, Portugal. ' University of Lisboa, Faculty of Sciences, Bloco C6, Campo Grande, Lisboa 1749-016, Portugal

Abstract: Critical infrastructures have evolved over the past decades to become largely computerised and interconnected all over the world. This generated the problem of achieving resilience of Critical Information Infrastructures (CII) against computer borne attacks and severe faults, similar to those observed in the internet. Governments and industry have been pushing an immense research effort in information and systems security, but we believe the complexity of the problem prevents it from being solved using classical security methods. This paper focuses on the computer systems behind electrical utility infrastructures. It proposes the blueprint of a distributed systems architecture that we believe may come to be useful as a reference for modern CII in general. The architecture is instantiated with a set of classes of techniques and algorithms, based on paradigms providing resilience to faults and attacks in an automatic way.

Keywords: critical information infrastructures; CII; distributed systems; security; fault tolerance; intrusion tolerance; firewalls; access control; middleware; critical infrastructures; attacks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSE.2008.018132

International Journal of System of Systems Engineering, 2008 Vol.1 No.1/2, pp.78 - 95

Published online: 02 May 2008 *

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