FP7: Critical Infrastructure Protection

ideas we have:

(i) Assume that attacks and breaches are unavoidable; focus on how to make systems resilient in spite of them. For instance, extend Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC) ideas to apply to the security infrastructure. What if instead of a company or country running services on servers, having them run on virtual machines (cf. what Amazon offers with its EC2 service) that run on farms and can be brought up and down at will? If something is attacked, we just bring it down and spawn another pre-configured virtual machine hosting exactly the same services... In sort, combine virtualisation and ROC for security infrastructure.

Recent moves in security infrastructure could already be interpreted under this light. DNS root servers have started adopting anycast, in which case traffic from a compromised server will automatically switch to a standby server via BGP.

Coming back to virtualisation, imagine we have an infrastructure that can host fully configured services; e.g., an image of a DNS server, or e-mail server, etc. The server itself runs as an instance of that image. When the image is attacked or compromised, you just bring up another image. This requires:

• A substrate on which the virtual machines will run
• A way to configure virtual machines and package them, so as to be ready for deployment
• A way to interact with the substrate and the virtual machines in order to control their operation

(ii) Develop a way to map critical IT infrastructures. The dependencies are very complex, and therefore you need tools and data to explore what is really critical. Is Vodafone part of Greece's critical infrastructure? Linux? Solaris? MS-DOS? Postgres? So we do a kind of service and artefact dependency analysis, mapping dependencies and criticality indicators/measures not only software but telecom links, hardware facilities, etc. We develop the software and then run a pilot study.

How do we measure criticality? I can come up with two dimensions:

1. one The amount of infrastructure affected. If we map the infrastructure on a graph, it is clear that some nodes are more central than others. This has been explored at length in scale-free networks research, providing grounding why the internet is vulnerable to targeted attacks.

1. two The exact effects on the affected infrastructure. A slight performance degradation is not the same as a crash.

In software, it has long since been observed that not all bugs are worth fixing, as they may never produce a failure. This observations may extend to whole security infrastructures, and perhaps this is what we are aiming at here?

(iii) Web applications security is constantly gaining the interest of research community, as the existence of web applications is getting ubiquitous, and new threats to the critical infrastructure are introduced. Ajax security, XSS, CSRF, to name a few, even traditional security people fail to understand and protect against these, or new attack vectors created by the complex nature of web applications. What I see missing is a well defined framework and/or the static analysis tools required to test applications and find vulnerabilities. Discovering and fixing such vulnerabilities is a great move towards more secure infrastructure. (mgogoulos)

Are you talking about some kind of Web 2.0 Security Infrastructure here?