Developing a Stress-Testing Platform for Cyber-Physical Water Infrastructure

Abstract

Water supply and sanitation infrastructures are essential for our welfare, but vulnerable to several attacks, typically of physical and cyber types. Cyber-physical attacks on critical infrastructures include chemical and/or biological contamination, physical or communications disruption between the network elements and the supervisory SCADA. Due to the ever-changing landscape of the digital world and the rising concerns about security, there is an emerging need for conceptualizing critical infrastructure as cyber-physical systems and develop a holistic risk management framework for its physical and cyber protection. The framework aims to strengthen the capacities of water utilities to systematically protect their systems, determine gaps in security technologies and improve risk management approaches. Our work envisions the development of a stress testing modelling platform, able to simulate the water system as a complete cyber-physical infrastructure and investigate attack scenarios and possible mitigation measures.