Hierarchical, model-based risk management of critical infrastructures

Risk management is a process that includes several steps, from vulnerability analysis to the formulation of a risk mitigation plan that selects countermeasures to be adopted. With reference to an information infrastructure, we present a risk management strategy that considers a sequence of hierarchical models, each describing dependencies among infrastructure components. A dependency exists anytime a security-related attribute of a component depends upon the attributes of other components. We discuss how this notion supports the formal definition of risk mitigation plan and the evaluation of the infrastructure robustness. A hierarchical relation exists among models that are analyzed because each model increases the level of details of some components in a previous one. Since components and dependencies are modeled through a hypergraph, to increase the model detail level, some hypergraph nodes are replaced by more and more detailed hypergraphs. We show how critical information for the assessment can be automatically deduced from the hypergraph and define conditions that determine cases where a hierarchical decomposition simplifies the assessment. In these cases, the assessment has to analyze the hypergraph that replaces the component rather than applying again all the analyses to a more detailed, and hence larger, hypergraph. We also show how the proposed framework supports the definition of a risk mitigation plan and discuss some indicators of the overall infrastructure robustness. Lastly, the development of tools to support the assessment is discussed. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.