Collaborative access control for critical infrastructures

Abstract

A critical infrastructure (CI) can fail with various degrees of severity due to physical and logical vulnerabilities. Since many interdependencies exist between CIs, failures can have dramatic consequences on the entire infrastructure. This paper focuses on threats that affect information and communication systems that constitute the critical information infrastructure (CII). A new collaborative access control framework called PolyOrBAC is proposed to address security problems that are specific to CIIs. The framework offers each organization participating in a CII the ability to collaborate with other organizations while maintaining control of its resources and internal security policy. The approach is demonstrated on a practical scenario involving the electrical power grid. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.