Title: Advanced trust negotiations in critical infrastructures

Authors: Stefano Braghin, Alberto Trombetta, Igor Nai Fovino

Addresses: Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy. ' Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy. ' JRC – European Commission, Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), Sensors, Radar Technologies and Cybersecurity Unit (SERAC), Ispra, Italy

Abstract: Modern Critical Infrastructures (CIs) (power grids, power plants, gas and oil pipelines, etc.) are strongly interconnected at the national and international levels nowadays. The failure of one of them can originate cascading effects which might have a serious and disastrous impact on others, even on geographically far infrastructures. The exchange of information about vulnerabilities, threats and countermeasures among the different actors of such interleaved systems assumes a not negligible role in the prevention of continental disasters. Due to its intrinsic nature, such information has to be considered strongly confidential and sensitive. Coping with the need for information sharing, preserving confidentiality according to some criteria, is a big obstacle in the creation of effective CI information sharing networks. In this paper, we present an extension of the well-known Trust-X negotiation framework which allows addressing of the confidentiality problem in the context of information sharing for CIs.

Keywords: trust negotiation; critical infrastructures; information sharing; access control policy; confidentiality.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2010.033338

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2010 Vol.6 No.3, pp.225 - 245

Received: 14 May 2009
Accepted: 20 Aug 2009
Published online: 01 Jun 2010 *

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