CRUTIAL: The Blueprint of a Reference Critical Information Infrastructure Architecture

The largely computerised nature of critical infrastructures and the pervasive interconnection of systems all over the world have generated the problem of achieving resilience of critical information infrastructures, namely against computer-borne attacks and severe faults. We believe the complexity of the problem prevents it from being solved using classical security methods. The paper focuses on the computer systems behind electrical utility infrastructures, and proposes the blueprint of a distributed systems architecture that we believe may come to be useful as a reference for modern critical information infrastructures in general. The architecture is populated with a set of classes of techniques and algorithms, based on paradigms providing resilience to faults and attacks in an automatic way.