International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection最新文献

The security of assets within electrical substations is paramount to ensuring the reliable and resilient operation of the energy sector. However, implementing existing industry cybersecurity standards in these environments presents numerous technical challenges. In this work, we provide systematic guidance that emphasizes best practices and prioritizes requirement implementation. We examine the application of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as a means to enhance security within the IEC 62443 family of standards. Specifically, we offer insights into how the security measures required for compliance with the IEC 62443 security standards can impact the stringent timing constraints of contemporary communication protocols, enabling advanced distribution system operations in the future. Utilizing a testbed modeled after a real-world electrical substation, we demonstrate that while SDN-based security features naturally introduce some additional latency, their operational impact on the network’s strict constraints is minimal.

Among environmental facilities, wastewater treatment facilities have a crucial role in sustaining human life, and any occurrence of an earthquake or flood within these facilities can result in various social, economic, and environmental issues, either directly or indirectly. Therefore, a quantitative vulnerability assessment of wastewater treatment facilities is necessary to minimize and prevent damage from earthquakes and flood disasters. For this reason, this study introduces a novel indicator to assess the susceptibility of disasters, considering aspects of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. The newly proposed indicator encompasses numerous evaluation criteria, topography, natural surroundings, hydraulic systems, structural composition, and non-structural features. Also, Weights derived using the combined weight calculation (CWC) method, which combined the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy weight method were applied to the indicator. It was tested across 23 cities to validate its efficacy, revealing a substantial correlation between the vulnerability index and the specific attributes of the city's wastewater treatment facilities. Therefore, this study analyzed wastewater treatment facilities by comparing the attributes of the urban areas under investigation, such as topological characteristics, urbanization levels, population density, infrastructure quality, and disaster preparedness resources available. The suggested methodology can facilitate the development of strategies aimed at averting damage caused by earthquakes or floods and reducing the adverse impact on wastewater treatment facilities while considering the unique characteristics of the urban setting in question.

This paper addresses the critical need for enhancing security in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks within Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) to protect the industrial processes from cyber-attacks. The purpose of our work is to propose and evaluate lightweight security measures to safeguard critical infrastructure resources. The scope of our effort involves simulating a secure SCADA/IoT-based hardware test bench for ICSs, utilizing Modbus and MQTT communication protocols. Through case studies in remote servo motor control, water distribution systems, and power system voltage level indicators, vulnerabilities such as Denial of Service (DoS) and Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attacks are identified, and security recommendations are provided. To execute our work, we deploy lightweight ciphers such as Prime Counter & Hash Chaining (PCHC) and Ascon algorithm with Compression Rate (ACR) for secure information exchange between the plant floor and the control center. Evaluation of these ciphers on Raspberry Pi focuses on execution speed and memory utilization. Additionally, a comparison with the AGA-12 protocol standard for SCADA networks is conducted to underscore the efficacy of the proposed security measures. Our findings include the identification of SCADA network vulnerabilities and the proposal of lightweight security measures to mitigate risks. Performance evaluation of the proposed ciphers on Raspberry Pi demonstrates their effectiveness, emphasizing the importance of deploying such measures to ensure resilience against cyber threats in SCADA environments.

Urban Underground Logistics Systems (UULS) have become an emerging solution to mitigate urban surface traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and surface transport safety risks. However, during the operation of UULS, the use of advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) introduces cybersecurity risks to the system. Moreover, severe natural disasters can also cause damage to underground transportation network links. Existing research and planning primarily concentrate on the system design and benefits of UULS, neglecting the system's service level under attack scenarios. This study outlines three representative UULS network prototypes and proposes a resilience quantification method centered on logistics efficiency. It also focuses on comparing the effectiveness of three recovery strategies. These strategies give priority to maximum flow, betweenness centrality, and regional importance, as well as the priority of node and link repairs. The resilience quantification method and recovery strategies are applied in a case study set in Nanjing City. The case study results reveal that the Two-echelon network shows exceptional resilience. Regarding the effectiveness of recovery strategies, the strategy based on maximum flow proves to be the most effective, and focusing on node repair can lead to higher system resilience. Based on these findings, this study offers recommendations to transportation and logistics management decision-makers, focusing on UULS resilience and recovery strategy selection. These recommendations are intended to provide valuable guidance for the planning and design of future UULS, ensuring their resilience and reliability.

The European Union is promoting cross-border electricity interconnection projects to achieve energy objectives, reduce the current fragmented European market, and eradicate the isolation of the most disadvantaged areas. However, selecting these projects is a complex task because there are multiple objectives, criteria, participants and alternatives involved. This paper aims to develop a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method for appropriately assessing and prioritizing cross-border electricity interconnection projects considering technical, economic, environmental and social criteria. Additionally, this work analyzes interconnection effects on the resilience of interconnected power systems. To verify its validity, this method is applied to prioritize new Spain-France interconnection infrastructure projects. From the results obtained, the technical and environmental criteria have proven to be the most important, since cross-border electricity interconnection projects are aimed at better market-coupling, less congestion and higher reliability while minimizing environmental impacts. In short, the proposed methodology provides a comprehensive view of the impact of these projects.

The cyber-attack on the Ukrainian positioning network at the beginning of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war demonstrated how the branching of satellite connections can have severe repercussions for communication systems. While ground-based networks are changing, the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to cyber-attacks and technical failures has become a serious concern. As cyber attackers are increasingly targeting industrial control systems rather than stealing data, attacks have become more sophisticated and significant. Future connectivity to 5 G networks, the entry of new private players in this sector, and the economic growth of emerging countries will further increase the attack surface of the space sector. A risk-based approach is therefore needed to increase protection and resilience against cyber-attacks. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the technologies and their vulnerabilities, as well as the ability to quickly develop solutions to counter attacks. Responding effectively with legal and policy means is essential to adapting to changes and to providing continuity and security of services. This paper highlights the main qualities of communication technology, its vulnerabilities, and the critical challenges to achieving cyber resilience. It identifies significant assets, defence solutions, and legal and policy aspects that should be further researched to enhance the cyber resilience of European assets.

This paper proposes a blockchain-based scheme, focusing on anonymous identity authentication and data aggregation, for safer and more reliable bidirectional communication between the utility company and power consumers based on Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Firstly, to cope with the mutual identity authentication between resource-constrained Smart Meters, a lightweight anonymous authentication strategy is designed using Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Meanwhile, a reputation-based consensus protocol is developed to accomplish data aggregation in AMI by using decentralization and non-tampering features of the blockchain. During the communication, in each time slot, the proposed scheme only needs to select a trusted user randomly to undertake the mining node rather than to introduce a third-party in a centralized manner to summarize and record the user-side data into the blockchain. Such scheme can effectively prevent data tampering and also be effective to decrease the processing complexity. The AVISPA tool is adopted to formally evaluate its security. The simulation results show promising performance. The proposed scheme not only can guarantee secure communication but also effectively decrease the computational cost in AMI.

Resilience has been evolving as a key criterion for infrastructure systems as it ensures the system's dynamic performance pre-, during, and post-hazard disruptions. However, estimating these performances is challenging due to system and operation complexities, and the probabilistic dynamic nature of infrastructure system. Moreover, infrastructure systems are usually exposed to multi-hazard environments, with their own probabilistic behavior, leading to additional complexity in terms of estimating the system response and, subsequently, the overall system resilience. As such, this study develops a probabilistic resilience-centric system dynamics modeling approach to quantify infrastructure dynamic resilience based on a holistic representation of infrastructure systems under multi-hazard scenarios, whereby the probabilistic natures of both the hazards and system are incorporated. Unlike the traditional resilience quantification approaches that represent system resilience by a single value calculated after the system's full recovery, the developed model focuses on tracking the temporal evolution of system resilience along the entire period of system performance deterioration and recovery. A real-world hydropower dam, as an example for infrastructure systems, in British Columbia, Canada is used as a demonstration application to show model utility in developing resilience-guided assessment plans for infrastructure systems. Overall, the developed approach empowers the decision-makers with insights into critical operational periods, the required time to reach specified resilience targets, and the efficiency of risk mitigation measures in real-time.

As digital landscapes become increasingly complex, safeguarding sensitive information and systems against cyber threats has become a paramount concern for organizations. This paper provides a comprehensive review of how enterprise architecture modeling is used in the context of cybersecurity assessment, particularly focusing on critical infrastructures. The use of enterprise architecture models for cybersecurity is motivated by the main purpose of enterprise architecture, namely to represent and manage business and IT assets and their interdependence. While enterprise architecture modeling originally served to assess Business/IT alignment, they are increasingly used to assess the cybersecurity of the enterprise. The research questions explored include the types of enterprise architecture models used for cybersecurity assessment, how security aspects are incorporated into these models, the theoretical frameworks and reference theories applied, the research methods used for evaluation, and the strengths and limitations of these models in supporting cybersecurity assessment. This review encompasses research papers published before 2024, focusing on high-quality research from peer-reviewed journals and reputable conferences, thereby providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the current state of research in this domain.

Even though electricity-heat integrated energy systems (IESs) can improve energy utilization, the faults generated by extreme events can induce more complex and wider impacts. Therefore, it is urgent to study the effective defense strategies associated with electricity-heat IES. Considering the theory of complex networks, a dynamic model was established in this paper which comprehensively considered the actual operating characteristics and cascading failure process of the electricity-heat IES. The structural and functional robustness of the electricity-heat IES after failure was evaluated by link survivability, capacity survivability and power survivability. According to the post-disaster system robustness evaluation results and system characteristics without adopting the defense strategy, the critical links of the system were identified. Also, seven defense strategies were formulated based on the cascading failure mechanism of the electricity-heat IES. The testing network coupled with an improved IEEE118-node power grid and 23-node heat supply network was used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed defense strategy and to provide a theoretical basis for the resilience enhancement strategy and defense resource allocation of the electricity-heat IES.