Towards the conception of a new approach for modeling interdependencies in Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

Critical infrastructures are the set of essential systems for the normal functioning of our modern society. Their failure could have severe consequences on economy and population and may undermine security. Indeed, their protection is a requirement. Nowadays Critical infrastructures are becoming tightly coupled and interdependent due to the exchange of products and services, which leads to the hardness of their protection. Therefore, a failure of a component of an infrastructure may impact the performance of other infrastructures. The work presented in this paper deals with Critical Infrastructures Protection regarding interdependencies. Within it, we compare between some modeling approaches used to study interdependencies in critical infrastructures, then we model them using UML sequence diagram to understand their operation, in order to extract their properties and strengths and use them in our proposed approach. Our purpose is to conceive a modeling approach to understand and reduce interdependencies' vulnerabilities, which must be general enough to be applied to any critical infrastructure case study.