Information Survivability Control Systems

We address the dependence of critical infrastructures— including electric power, telecommunications, finance and transportation—on vulnerable information systems. Our approach is based on the notion of control. We envision distributed, hierarchical, adaptive, multiple model, discretestate control systems to monitor infrastructure information systems and respond to disruptions (e.g., security attacks) by changing operating modes and design configurations to minimize loss of utility. Controlling legacy information systems presents some significant challenges. To explore and evaluate our approach, we have developed a toolkit for building distributed dynamic models of infrastructure information systems. We used this toolkit to build a model of a simple subset of the United States payment system and a control system for this model information system. Keywords Infrastructure survivability, control, architecture economics

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Kevin J. Sullivan, John C. Knight, Xing Du, Steve Geist
• Keywords: Control System, ICSE 1999, Information System, Infrastructure Information Systems, Software Engineering