Managing and Securing Critical Infrastructure - A Semantic Policy and Trust Driven Approach

Cyber physical systems (CPS) and cyber infrastructure are a key elements of the national infrastructure, and securing them is of vital importance to national security. There is ample evidence that these systems are vulnerable to disruption and damage due to natural disasters social crises, and terrorism. CPS applications are becoming more widespread, ranging from healthcare patient monitoring systems to autonomous vehicles to integrated electrical power grids. often the new application domains cross administrative boundaries and are not under the supervisory control of a single domain. This introduces critical issues of policy and trust that have not been traditionally addressed in their design and management. Most work in securing CPS and cyber infrastructure has focused on security of the communication links between the sensing and actuating elements. We describe a more holistic approach that is based on the concepts of situation awareness for monitoring the state of a CPS system and high-level policies to to manage their functioning and security. Such a framework can manage the trust relationship among entities as well as external contextual information when detecting, evaluating and responding to threats. We illustrate the framework by showing how it can protect the traditional Internet backbone by automatically configuring BGP router systems, defending against attacks and recovering from accidental or malicious damage. We also illustrate how the same framework can be used to secure devices and information in mobile networks. <p> See <a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=yj15qJtTtf4C&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false\">Book preview</a>.