Project Objectives

Critical infrastructures are central to the sustainable development in societies and economies. The existing critical infrastructures have been evolving for a long time and have become large. Protection systems for such infrastructures have usually been designed for some specific purpose, and are usually operated as independent systems.  Along time, some new, increasingly sophisticated capabilities, have been added to the protection systems.

Complex interactions between the elements of a critical infrastructure indicate, that there is also a need to deploy a corresponding infrastructure protection system, which is capable of extending security control to all elements of the protected system, and which is, at the same time,  capable of maintaining a global view of the infrastructure. Unfortunately, one of the concerns with the networked protection systems is related to the complexity of interactions and to the amount of exchanges, during the acquisition, transmission, aggregation and processing of data pertaining to the state of the elements in the protected infrastructure. The amount of data, its different type and origin, can quickly become overwhelming to an aggregation and processing system, thus making any systematic correlation and inference about the state of the infrastructure quite infeasible. As a result, protection systems are becoming incapable of ensuring appropriate security levels. Such situation requires an approach, which is different than what is commonly supported today.

The key objective of the NI2S3 project is to research and implement a reference methodology for developing security systems based on NEC Information and Integration Services. The security systems must be capable of collecting and processing information from many heterogeneous sources in order to build up or improve situation awareness of critical infrastructures.

More specifically, the NI2S3 Project aims:

• to provide a definition and a design of an NI2S3 critical infrastructure protection system regarding the security, resiliency and availability of the subject infrastructure,
• to define performance indicators and tools for system validation,
• to develop a technology for the evaluation of the performance, robustness and reliability of such a protection system,
• to develop a NI2S3 application demo.
  

The resulting protection system should involve all the necessary components and tools to acquire, exchange  and process the state monitoring information.  It should rely on the continuous feeding of the information, in order to ensure that it arrives at the right place, right time, preferably in the form, which makes it quickly usable for the intended purpose, and which can result in appropriate and timely actions.
NI2S3 Project will ensure that the prospective protection system is error-proof, in what concerns vulnerabilities. As an example, the protection system must not react in ways that may lead to erroneous, inadequate or disproportional system reactions. Instead, the NI2S3 system has to provide information at different granularity levels in a timely manner to plan, direct and control all operational activities pertaining to critical infrastructure protection.