Yes / In the twenty-first century, globalisation made corporate boundaries invisible and difficult to manage. This new macroeconomic transformation caused by globalisation introduced new challenges for critical infrastructure management. By replacing manual tasks with automated decision making and sophisticated technology, no doubt we feel much more secure than half a century ago. As the technological advancement takes root, so does the maturity of security threats. It is common that today’s critical infrastructures are operated by non-computer experts, e.g. nurses in health care, soldiers in military or firefighters in emergency services. In such challenging applications, protecting against insider attacks is often neither feasible nor economically possible, but these threats can be managed using suitable risk management strategies. Security technologies, e.g. firewalls, help protect data assets and computer systems against unauthorised entry. However, one area which is often largely ignored is the human factor of system security. Through social engineering techniques, malicious attackers are able to breach organisational security via people interactions. This paper presents a security awareness training framework, which can be used to train operators of critical infrastructure, on various social engineering security threats such as spear phishing, baiting, pretexting, among others.

The failure of critical infrastructure is one of the most serious threats, especially in health care. Hospitals and health care facilities play an irreplaceable role, so it is essential to maintain the capacity and responsiveness of the health care facility as a whole during the blackout period. In energy, which is one of the areas of critical infrastructure, power outages can occur at any time, so the hospital should be unconditionally prepared for this crisis situation and the resulting impacts. The theoretical part defines the basic concepts in the health care system located in crisis preparedness and crisis planning, as well as necessary documentation and electrical regulations. The following chapter deals with the critical infrastructure from the perspective of national and international legislative documents and links to the means for its protection. The last part explains the principle of the electricity system of the Czech Republic and describes the production, transmission and distribution of electricity. The topic of Blackout outlines the issue of domestic and foreign cases. The practical part introduces the environment of the Hospital Strakonice, a.s., further describes the available alternative sources of electric energy and legislative standards of the company, on the principles of which it respects crisis preparedness. Three specific cases explain how critical infrastructure failures can be addressed, prevent unwanted situations, respond to problems promptly, and take remedial action. For elaboration of my diploma thesis I used basic scientific procedures which are observation, consultation, analysis and comparison. The aim of the thesis was to map the readiness of the health and non-health part of the hospital to the impact of the failure of critical infrastructure, which could be described as satisfactory. The findings will be forwarded to the Chairman of the Board of Directors and the Crisis Management Department of the Strakonice Hospital, a.s. to assess the possible consequences and effective preparedness for critical infrastructure failures. The results can be used as study material.

Esta Tese apresenta uma contribuição para avaliação da comunicação digital na operação de veículos aéreos não tripulados (VANT) no ambiente aeronáutico. A comunicação digital aeronáutica relaciona-se diretamente ao nível de segurança crítica desejado para o controle do fluxo de tráfego aéreo, por parte de autoridades e de órgãos normativos, os quais possuem como objetivo tornar a comunicação uniforme para todos os continentes. Diversas são as discussões acerca do nível de segurança crítica que a comunicação digital entre VANT e controle em terra possa exibir, sempre buscando redução da exposição a riscos inerentes à operação desse tipo de veículo. Nesse contexto, a proposta desta Tese é avaliar a segurança na comunicação digital, por meio do uso de injeção de falhas, para operações de veículos aéreos não tripulados. Este trabalho descreve a importância de analisar as interferências causadas por falhas na comunicação digital, relacionadas ao envio de mensagens entre o órgão de controle e a aeronave não tripulada. Também são definidos quais os tipos de falhas que causam um maior impacto na comunicação, bem como quais os parâmetros que devem ser utilizados para manipulação das variáveis de falhas na comunicação. Para atender a avaliação proposta, foi utilizado o ambiente simulado que reúne as características do ambiente aeronáutico, denominado PipE-SEC (Plataforma Integrada para Ensaios de Sistemas Embarcados Críticos), bem como o protocolo CPDLC (Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications) para troca de mensagens digitais. / This thesis presents a contribution to the evaluation of digital communication in the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the aeronautical environment. Aeronautical digital communication relates directly to the critical safety level required for controlling the air traffic flow by authorities and regulatory agencies, which are aimed at making communication uniform for all continents. There are several discussions about the safety critical level that digital communication between UAVs and ground control can display, always seeking to reduce exposure to risks inherent in the operation of such vehicles. In this context, the proposal of this thesis is to evaluate the safety in digital communication, through the use of fault injection for operations of UAV. This work describes the importance of analyzing the interference caused by faults in digital communication related to sending messages between the control agency and the UAV. There are also defined what types of faults cause a greater impact on communication as well as which parameters should be used to simulate communication faults. To answer the proposed evaluation, we used the simulated environment that combines the features of the aeronautical environment, called PIpE-SEC (Integrated Platform for Test Critical Embedded Systems), as well as the protocol CPDLC (Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications) to exchange digital messages.

<div><div><div><p>The resilience of critical infrastructure, such as water distribution systems and power systems, is critical for both the economy and public safety and health. However, methods and tools for evaluating and improving the resilience of these systems must be able to address the large network sizes, nonlinear physics, discrete decisions, and uncertainty. This dissertation focuses on the development of modeling and optimization techniques that address these difficulties, enabling the evaluation and improvement of power and water distribution system resilience.</p><p>In Part I, we present novel stochastic optimization models to improve power systems resilience to extreme weather events. We consider proactive redispatch, transmission line hardening, and transmission line capacity increases as alternatives for mitigating the effects of extreme weather. Our model is based on linearized or "DC" optimal power flow, similar to models in widespread use by independent system operators (ISOs) and regional transmission operators (RTOs). Our computational experiments indicate that each of these strategies can play a major role in power systems resilience.</p><p>We then extend the resilience formulations to investigate the role chemical process facilities, as industrial energy consumers, can play in improving electric grid resilience through demand response (DR). For process facilities to effectively negotiate demand response (DR) contracts and make investment decisions regarding flexibility, they need to quantify their additional value to the grid. We also reformulate the DR problems using the more accurate nonlinear alternating current power flow model to investigate the effect of the linear DC approximation. Our numerical results demonstrate that the linearized model often underestimates the amount of DR needed, motivating scalable solution algorithms for Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problems in power systems.</p><div><div><div><p>An important step in many MINLP algorithms is the global solution of a Nonlinear Programming (NLP) subproblem. For power systems applications, this involves global solution of NLP’s containing the alternating current (AC) power flow model. This thesis presents several advances to aid in global optimization of AC power flow equations. We show that a strong upper bound on the objective of the alternating current optimal power flow (ACOPF) problem can significantly improve the effectiveness of optimization-based bounds tightening (OBBT) on a number of relaxations. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of the reference bus on OBBT. We find that, if reference bus constraints are included, relaxations of the rectangular form significantly strengthen existing relaxations and that the effectiveness of OBBT at a given iteration is directly related to the distance of the corresponding bus from the reference bus.</p><p>Ultimately, with OBBT alone, we are able to reduce the optimality gap to less than 0.1% on all but 5 NESTA test cases with up to 300 buses. However, the computational expense required for OBBT grows rapidly with the size of the network. We present a decomposition algorithm based on graph partitioning to drastically improve this performance. Our numerical results demonstrate that our decomposed bounds tightening (DBT) algorithm results in variable bounds nearly as tight as those obtained with traditional, full-space OBBT. Furthermore, the computational expense of the DBT algorithm scales far more favorably with problem size, resulting in drastically reduced wallclock times, especially for large networks.</p><p>In Part II, we describe the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR), an new open source Python package designed to help water utilities investigate resilience of water distribution systems to hazards and evaluate resilience-enhancing actions. The WNTR modeling framework is presented and a case study is described that uses WNTR to simulate the effects of an earthquake on a water distribution system. The case study illustrates that the severity of damage is not only a function of system integrity and earthquake magnitude, but also of the available resources and repair strategies used to return the system to normal operating conditions. While earthquakes are particularly concerning since buried water distribution pipelines are highly susceptible to damage, the software framework can be applied to other types of hazards, including power outages and contamination incidents.</p></div></div></div></div></div></div>

Esta Tese apresenta uma contribuição para avaliação da comunicação digital na operação de veículos aéreos não tripulados (VANT) no ambiente aeronáutico. A comunicação digital aeronáutica relaciona-se diretamente ao nível de segurança crítica desejado para o controle do fluxo de tráfego aéreo, por parte de autoridades e de órgãos normativos, os quais possuem como objetivo tornar a comunicação uniforme para todos os continentes. Diversas são as discussões acerca do nível de segurança crítica que a comunicação digital entre VANT e controle em terra possa exibir, sempre buscando redução da exposição a riscos inerentes à operação desse tipo de veículo. Nesse contexto, a proposta desta Tese é avaliar a segurança na comunicação digital, por meio do uso de injeção de falhas, para operações de veículos aéreos não tripulados. Este trabalho descreve a importância de analisar as interferências causadas por falhas na comunicação digital, relacionadas ao envio de mensagens entre o órgão de controle e a aeronave não tripulada. Também são definidos quais os tipos de falhas que causam um maior impacto na comunicação, bem como quais os parâmetros que devem ser utilizados para manipulação das variáveis de falhas na comunicação. Para atender a avaliação proposta, foi utilizado o ambiente simulado que reúne as características do ambiente aeronáutico, denominado PipE-SEC (Plataforma Integrada para Ensaios de Sistemas Embarcados Críticos), bem como o protocolo CPDLC (Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications) para troca de mensagens digitais. / This thesis presents a contribution to the evaluation of digital communication in the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the aeronautical environment. Aeronautical digital communication relates directly to the critical safety level required for controlling the air traffic flow by authorities and regulatory agencies, which are aimed at making communication uniform for all continents. There are several discussions about the safety critical level that digital communication between UAVs and ground control can display, always seeking to reduce exposure to risks inherent in the operation of such vehicles. In this context, the proposal of this thesis is to evaluate the safety in digital communication, through the use of fault injection for operations of UAV. This work describes the importance of analyzing the interference caused by faults in digital communication related to sending messages between the control agency and the UAV. There are also defined what types of faults cause a greater impact on communication as well as which parameters should be used to simulate communication faults. To answer the proposed evaluation, we used the simulated environment that combines the features of the aeronautical environment, called PIpE-SEC (Integrated Platform for Test Critical Embedded Systems), as well as the protocol CPDLC (Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications) to exchange digital messages.

The smooth and reliable operation of key infrastructure components like water distribution systems, electric power systems, and telecommunications is essential for a nation?s economic growth and overall security. Tragic events such as the Northridge earthquake and Hurricane Katrina have shown us how the occurrence of a disaster can cripple one or more such critical infrastructure components and cause widespread damage and destruction. Technological advancements made over the last few decades have resulted in these infrastructure components becoming highly complicated and inter-dependent on each other. The development of tools which can aid in understanding this complex interaction amongst the infrastructure components is thus of paramount importance for being able to manage critical resources and carry out post-emergency recovery missions. The research work conducted as a part of this thesis aims at studying the effects of fire (a calamitous event) on the electrical distribution network of a city. The study has been carried out on a test bed comprising of a virtual city named Micropolis which was modeled using a Geographic Information System (GIS) based software package. This report describes the designing of a separate electrical test bed using Simulink, based on the GIS layout of the power distribution network of Micropolis. It also proposes a method of quantifying the damage caused by fire to the electrical network by means of a parameter called the Load Loss Damage Index (LLDI). Finally, it presents an innovative graph theoretic approach for determining how to route power across faulted sections of the electrical network using a given set of Normally Open switches. The power is routed along a path of minimum impedance. The proposed methodologies are then tested by running numerous simulations on the Micropolis test bed, corresponding to different fire spread scenarios. The LLDI values generated from these simulation runs are then analyzed in order to determine the most damaging scenarios and to identify infrastructure components of the city which are most crucial in containing the damage caused by fire to the electrical network. The conclusions thereby drawn can give useful insights to emergency response personnel when they deal with real-life disasters.

This dissertation examines the interdependence between urban water distribution systems and urban fire response. The focus on interdependent critical infrastructures is driven by concern for security of water systems and the effects on related infrastructures if water distribution systems are damaged by terrorist attack or natural disaster. A model of interdependent infrastructures (principally water distribution systems and fire response) is developed called the Model of Urban Fire Spread (MUFS). The model includes the capacity to simulate firefighting water demands in a community water system hydraulic model, building-to-building urban fire spread, and suppression activities. MUFS is an improvement over previous similar models because it allows simulation of urban fires at the level of individual buildings and it permits simulation of interdependent infrastructures working in concert. MUFS is used to simulate a series of multi-mode attacks and failures (MMAFs) – events which disable the water distribution system and simultaneously ignite an urban fire. The consequences of MMAF scenarios are analyzed to determine the most serious modes of infrastructure failure and urban fire ignition. Various methods to determine worst-case configurations of urban fire ignition points are also examined. These MMAF scenarios are used to inform the design of potential mitigation measures to decrease the consequences of the urban fire. The effectiveness of mitigation methods is determined using the MUFS simulation tool. Novel metrics are developed to quantify the effectiveness of the mitigation methods from the time-series development of their consequences. A cost-benefit analysis of the various mitigation measures is conducted to provide additional insight into the methods’ effectiveness and better inform the decision-making process of selecting mitigation methods. Planned future work includes further refinement of the representation of fire propagation and suppression in MUFS and investigation of historical MMAF events to validate simulation predictions. Future efforts will continue development of appropriate optimization methods for determining worst-case MMAF scenarios. This work should be of interest to water utility managers and emergency planners, who can adapt the methodology to analyze their communities’ vulnerability to MMAFs and design mitigation techniques to meet their unique needs, as well as to researchers interested in infrastructure modeling and disaster simulation.

Protection of the agriculture and food infrastructure, defined as "the physical production and distribution systems critical to supporting national security and economic well-being, including all activities essential to food, feed, and fiber production, including all techniques for raising and processing livestock," is the responsibility of all stakeholders in the food supply chain (Spellman, 2008, p.8). Though many stakeholders emerge in the chain, producers are the primary line of defense to a disease epidemic. Many factors influence livestock producers‘ protective action decision process in relation to biological hazards. By identifying these factors in a specific producer population, more effective preparedness programs and messages can be developed by risk communicators. The purpose and objectives of this study determined Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association (TSCRA) members‘ perceptions of vulnerability to the Texas cattle industry, perceived emergency preparedness level, barriers to adoption of protective actions, and sources of animal health information. This study targeted 7,661 members of the TSCRA. An online survey questionnaire developed from previous research with similar populations allowed TSCRA members to respond to questions related to the objective of this study. A representative sample of TSCRA members from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico responded to the survey. Recognizing susceptibility to biological hazards, TSCRA members identified high levels of perceived trust and reliability in local veterinarians as a source of information, consistent with previous studies. Although the majority of members reported they did not have a biosecurity plan implemented on their operations, they did recognize the necessity of preventative practices. TSCRA members were neutral on all barriers to adoption of protective actions; however, the barrier "lack of information" was rated higher by means as a barrier to adoption of protective actions. When investigating differences among noncommercial and commercial operations managed by TSCRA members, no statistical differences were identified in this study. However, when investigating differences among TSCRA members and number of cattle managed, a weak positive correlation was identified for perception of hazard by threat in relation to more animals managed. Findings of this study confirmed sources stating that the agriculture and food infrastructure is vulnerable to biological hazards as perceived by livestock owners (Motes, 2007; Spellman, 2008). Ashlock (2006) and Riley (2007) found similar perspectives of vulnerability among Oklahoma and Kansas producers further strengthening the need to protect the agriculture and food critical infrastructure as outlined by Homeland Security Presidential Directive – 9 (HSPD-9, 2004). Since it was determined that veterinarians are perceived to be the most reliable and trustworthy source of information by TSCRA members, local opinion leaders, such as veterinarians, should engage in train-the-trainer programs to ensure a consistent risk communication message is being disseminated.