A case study assessing the effects of cyber attacks on a river zonal dispatcher

Abstract

A river zonal dispatcher is a system that sends collected environmental data to a national dispatcher and sends warnings in case of danger (such as flooding of river basins). If the system fails to function normally, warnings may cease, putting lives and property in serious peril. We have examined the security of a river zonal dispatcher using the ADVISE modeling formalism in the Möbius modeling tool. This work both illustrates the usefulness of ADVISE in choosing among alternative approaches to system security and provides a quantitative evaluation of the dispatcher itself. In doing so, it shows whether intrusion detection systems (IDSes) make a difference in the behavior of an adversary, and which path of attack is most attractive to particular types of adversaries.