Securing critical infrastructure: A semantically enhanced sensor based approach

Abstract

Being center of both public and hazardous material transport system, railway is one of the most important critical infrastructures. This research is aiming to support secure access to information, dependable and reliable operation, efficient management and maintenance of the railway infrastructure. In this regard, this paper proposes a framework where sensors retrieve the contextual data from the infrastructure and a middleware processes these data and the semantics of data to derive decisions. These decisions allow monitoring of information and generate alarms for faults. The decisions may recommend actions to deal with the faults and provide secure access to information only to authorized personnel. The semantic technologies such as ontology language, rule language and reasoning process are used to design the middleware. The paper includes detailed description of the middleware and an overview of its implementation steps.