The joint threats of increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters due to climate change and increasingly prevalent and sophisticated cyberattacks pose a serious threat to national critical infrastructure. We are investigating compound threats to critical infrastructure systems, where damage due to a natural disaster is compounded by opportunistic cyberattacks that attempt to capitalize on that damage to further disrupt the system or delay the recovery process. The goals of this project are to develop frameworks to model the effects of these compound threats, and to design new system architectures that can better withstand this combination of natural disasters and malicious attacks.
We are especially interested in compound threats to the power grid, and are exploring techniques to build resilience in the context of the Spire Intrusion-Tolerant SCADA System for the Power Grid, which is developed by the Pitt RSSLab and the Johns Hopkins University Distributed Systems and Networks (DSN) Lab.
This project is currently funded through the DoD Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), in a ongoing project “Severe Impact Resilience: Framework for Adaptive Compound Threats”.