The Infrastructure Web: a System for Distributed Monitoring and Management

National-scale critical infrastructure protection depends on many processes: intelligence gathering, analysis, interdiction, detection, response and recovery, to name a few. These processes are typically carried out by different individuals, agencies and industry sectors. Many new threats to national infrastructure are arising from the complex couplings that exist between advanced information technologies (telecommunications and internet), physical components (utilities), human services (health, law enforcement, emergency management) and commerce (financial services, logistics). Those threats arise and evolve at a rate governed by human intelligence and innovation, on “internet time” so to speak. The processes for infrastructure protection must operate on the same time scale to be effective. To achieve this, a new approach to integrating, coordinating and managing infrastructure protection must be deployed. To this end, we describe the key ingredients of an Infrastructure Web. The Infrastructure Web is a web-like architecture for decentralized monitoring and managing critical national infrastructures.