Paper Info
Title
Mixed Holistic Reductionistic Approach for Impact Assessment of Cyber Attacks
Abstract
Recently issues about cyber-war have gained relevant attention, especially because of gravity of damages that could be caused by cyber attacks to strategic targets, mining security of citizens. Examples of targets might include national civil and military airports, command and control systems of civil and military transportation means electronic military systems for national defense, national infrastructures for water and electricity distribution, industries and also hospitals or firefighters informatics systems. The risk of cyber attacks for the mentioned systems and infrastructures has grown because of the introduction of general-purpose and open (not proprietary)communication protocols, widely interconnecting systems and services. With this regard, it is of great importance the problem of evaluating the impact that cyber attacks could generate and to select effective countermeasures to protect military and civil heterogeneous and interconnected systems. In this paper the Mixed Holistic Reductionist (MHR) model is proposed as a conceptual methodology to evaluate the impact of a set of cyber attacks to military and civil infrastructures of strategic interest. The reductionist approach allows modeling of heterogeneous systems using the simplest elements and then coming to assess the interaction of basic components. The holistic paradigm instead allows to analyze complex systems by evaluating their behavior in complex and thus as a monolithic unit. This model allows combining the holistic method with the reductionist, trying to maintain the benefits of both paradigms. The two methods are linked together through an additional layer which is an intermediate level of abstraction, usually represented by the services of any infrastructure. Services are defined as logical objects, in order to obtain useful functionality to the customer, or other infrastructure. The validity of MHR model has been already tested within the context of Critical Infrastructure protection. In particular, it has been implemented in CISIA, a system-interdependency simulator, developed by "Roma Tre"University. In this work, the effectiveness of the model is studied with regard to government infrastructure protection from cyber attacks and, with this regard, an explicative case study is presented.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/EISIC.2012.30
EISIC
Keywords
Field
DocType
command and control systems,computer network security,digital simulation,government,national security,protocols,CISIA,MHR model validity,Roma Tre University,citizen security,civil system protection,civil transportation,command and control systems,critical infrastructure protection,critical infrastructure simulation by interdependent agents,cyber attack impact assessment,cyber attack impact evaluation,cyber attack risk,cyber-war,electricity distribution,electronic military systems,fire-fighters,general-purpose communication protocols,government infrastructure protection,heterogeneous systems,hospitals,interconnected systems,military airports,military system protection,military transportation,mixed holistic reductionistic approach,national civil airports,national defense,national infrastructures,open communication protocols,strategic targets,system-interdependency simulator,water distribution,critical infrastructures,cyber attacks,impact assessment
National security,Countermeasure,Data modeling,Computer security,Computer science,Critical infrastructure protection,Network security,Reductionism,Communications protocol,Government
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.76
8
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Giusj Digioia141.79
Chiara Foglietta2418.43
Stefano Panzieri326936.84
Alessandro Falleni4322.40