Resilient Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

Critical infrastructures, such as the electric grid or transportation systems, empower our modern society. Their disruption can seriously impair the daily lives of millions of people. Due to this fact, they are attractive targets in cyber war or in large-scale sophisticated attacks. Moreover, in disasters or crises, critical infrastructures might face severe perturbations or even a breakdown, thus affecting the population at large. This chapter begins by summarising the different critical infrastructure sectors and gives examples of previous incidents affecting the service offered by these infrastructures. It then goes on to introduce the concept of resiliency: resilient critical infrastructures are designed to withstand disasters, crises, and adversarial influence. They are able to maintain their core functionalities even under attack. The chapter subsequently discusses how critical infrastructures can be made resilient. This requires adopting a “defence in depth” concept, i.e., deploying multiple layers of security controls, but we also provide further recommendations to this end.