Critical Infrastructure Security and the Role of AI: An Overview

Abstract

Critical Information Infrastructures (CIIs) are an increasingly important focus area of industrial automation, particularly regarding the current developments towards Industry 5.0 and the industrial metaverse. Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) is one of the fastest growing areas of cyber security primarily due to the expectations of both large companies and governments to protect their critical infrastructure in the interest of economic stability and citizen security. The critical infrastructures themselves are becoming increasingly automated due to the increasing availability and lower cost of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods for downstream tasks such as predictive maintenance, load forecasting and anomaly detection. AI methods can also be used to protect critical information infrastructures, for example by implementing sophisticated algorithms for threat modelling and intrusion detection. The focus of this work is on the latter: The applications (and potential) of AI to secure CIIs in the presence of increasing amounts of cyberattacks. It is becoming ever more important to understand the current state of the art in using AI to protect CII. For example, it is imperative to understand the general capabilities of AI for downstream tasks such as intrusion detection and investigate the potential capabilities of AI for upstream tasks such as self-supervised learning, representation learning and generative modelling specifically for cybersecurity.