Security by Design for Interconnected Critical Infrastructures

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The objective of the proposed collaborative work is to advance the state of the art in the design of secureinterconnected public infrastructures. The focus is on Security-by-Design. While security-by-design is not a newconcept, the approach proposed here and its context, are and especially so in the context of interconnectedpublic infrastructure.The increasing commoditisation of components for critical infrastructures has led to the widespread use of embedded computers in such systems. These computers are often interconnected using wireless communications or ethernet. This trend has been accelerated by the need for remote maintenance capability and regular upgrades of systems. An undesirable consequence has been that critical infrastructures have become interconnected and interdependent. The result of an attack on one infrastructure may well havecascading effects on others. Understanding such interdependencies and developing new design methodologies to avoid the possibility of cascading security failures is central to this proposal.The objective will be met through the following key steps: (a) modeling based on abstraction from system designfor security analysis, (b) impact and response analysis across interconnected infrastructures using the model, and(c) upgrading of the initial design to improve system resilience to cyber attacks. A significant outcome of the aboveapproach will be a software prototype that implements the steps mentioned above and the integration of such toolswith state of the art existing design tools. The methodology and the tools developed will be assessed for theireffectiveness and practical utility through experiments designed jointly by the research teams from Imperial andSUTD. The experiments will be conducted on state of the art testbeds available at SUTD for power and water.Generalized attack models, in contrast to specific models that exist today, will be used to create objectively designedcyber attacks to assess the resilience of interconnected systems when one or multiple systems are under attack.