Cyber Reliability, Resilience, and Safety of Physical Infrastructures

Abstract

The paper considers the problem of constructing a full group of failure scenarios for physical infrastructures when subjected to cyber attacks (CAs). Physical infrastructures actually are systems of systems, or network of networks [1]. The main idea of the research rests on the assumption, that in order to damage any physical infrastructure by a cyber attack, it has to be able to produce a powerful enough physical impact on the most vulnerable part(s) of the infrastructure. Only civil engineering and industrial structures and installations connected to Internet and World Wide Web are considered. Hence, all infrastructures discussed below have to be elements of the Enterprise IoT or IoT, namely: electrical grids, oil, gas and product pipeline systems, water supply and disposal (waste) systems, rail networks, air traffic control and telecommunications (finance, commerce, business) networks, etc. The paper discusses how to construct a full group of scenarios of physical impacts on an infrastructure and how to calculate reliability, resilience and safety of infrastructures exposed to CAs. This paper should calm down the legitimate concerns of lay people about disclosing vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures, because it raises the awareness and offers infinitely much more to the armor/shield than to the canon/spear. © 2019 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.