Distributed Online Risk Assessment in the National Cyberspace

Abstract

The paper presents a distributed approach to online cyber risk assessment across the country, taking into account cyber threats and vulnerabilities identified by local services operators. It consists in distributed, asynchronous calculations of possible failure scenarios. They are a solution of a set of nonlinear, nonsmooth equations with locally assessed risk activation functions as inputs. These functions indicate whether a given threat is expected in some future period. The convergence condition of the mentioned algorithm is given in the theorem form. At the end, a case study concerning a system consisting of four entities is presented.