Title: Increasing security and protection of SCADA systems through infrastructure resilience

Authors: Salvatore D'Antonio, Luigi Romano, Abdelmajid Khelil, Neeraj Suri

Addresses: Department of Technology, University of Naples 'Parthenope', Centro Direzionale di Napoli, Napoli 80143, Italy. ' Department of Technology, University of Naples 'Parthenope', Centro Direzionale di Napoli, Napoli 80143, Italy. ' Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Karolinenplatz 5, 64289, Germany. ' Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Karolinenplatz 5, 64289, Germany

Abstract: In this paper, we present the approach we have taken in the INcreasing Security and Protection through Infrastructure Resilience (INSPIRE) project to improve the protection of critical information infrastructures. The core idea of the INSPIRE project is to protect critical information infrastructures (CIIs) by appropriately configuring, managing and securing the communication network infrastructure which interconnects supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, the key building blocks of CIIs. In order to do so, a self-reconfigurable architecture has been designed, which provides mechanisms for detecting, diagnosing, and treating faults and attacks which might compromise the correct operation of a critical infrastructure. The paper presents the overall architecture of the INSPIRE framework and provides a detailed description of some key system components, namely the subsystems in charge of the monitoring, of the diagnostic activities and of the provision of peer-to-peer (P2P) network support.

Keywords: critical infrastructures; information infrastructures; CIIs; supervisory control; data acquisition; SCADA; peer-to-peer; P2P networks; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; network resilience; fault diagnosis; wireless networks; self-reconfigurable architectures; attack detection; network security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSE.2009.031348

International Journal of System of Systems Engineering, 2009 Vol.1 No.4, pp.401 - 413

Received: 21 Jul 2009
Accepted: 20 Aug 2009
Published online: 01 Feb 2010 *

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