Topic overview

Since the American commission on critical infrastructures protection in 1997, large infrastructures such as telecommunication, transportation, electrical or water supply networks have received much attention from the political and research communities. The recent over-protective ambiance in western countries increased the efforts put into this theme.

These networks may generally be considered as large and complex systems, as they span over the entire planet, composed of several smaller networks, interconnected and interdependent.

Several research initiatives have been granted by different governmental agencies in order to study the safety and the security of these multi-operated global networks and to develop solutions to prevent severe scenarios from happening.

At first sight, this research field may appear tainted with a lot of paranoid thinking. However, the characterization of the capacity of these infrastructures to resist to failures and attacks is still imprecise. The domain requires a great modeling effect to identify the true problems that may impact these infrastructures and that may be solved by computer science and communication techniques.

Through different collaborations, we are currently interested into two main problems:

  • The interdependencies between infrastructures is an important factor to consider, as a failure in one network may impact its more or less direct neighbors, potentially spanning over different infrastructure types. The classical common sense example of such cross-domain interdependencies is the relationship between telecommunication and electrical networks. We believe that, as soon as different and potentially concurrent operators are involved in a common task, there may exist dependencies that may not be intrinsic but that may be due to the lack of vision one may have over the black box represented by a single network.
  • The interaction between different objectives also appears as a potential cause of problems. We are currently interested in modeling the interactions between safety and security objectives. If these two objectives should not, in theory, be antagonistic, they generally fall under the responsibility of different services and their implementation may include some contradictory or redundant procedures.

Students

  • Alpha Diallo, Ph.D thesis on the topic of critical infrastructures interdependencies.
  • Ludovic Piètre-Cambacédès, Ph.D thesis on the subject of interactions between safety and security.

Contractual research projects

  • The SINARI ANR (French) Project deals with interdependencies between electrical and telecommunication networks.
  • The IRRIIS European Integrated Project (ICT-FP6) (2006 - 2009) addressed interdependencies problems between telecommunication and electrical networks.