Risk and Security Management for Critical Infrastructures

Dear Colleagues,

Critical Infrastructures together with their utility networks play a crucial role in our day-to-day life. These infrastructures are providing the core services for guaranteeing the supply with basic resources (power, communication, etc.), vital supplies (water, food, medicine, etc.), and industrial goods (oil, gas, etc.). Hence, they are of utmost importance for the well-being of our society, and their sustainability and resilience will be a core aspect in the future. As has been shown over the last decade, critical infrastructures have evolved into a complex and highly sensitive ecosystem, in which an incident within one of the infrastructures can have far-reaching consequences, affecting multiple other infrastructures as well as society as a whole. Not only major incidents in the last few years, such as the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks or major blackouts in Venezuela, but also this year’s COVID-19 pandemic, have again emphasized these vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures and the severity of possible consequences of an incident.

This Special Issue will cover novel methodologies, concepts, and tools to support and strengthen the risk and security management for Cis, thus creating sustainable and resilient CIs. Therefore, it will focus on how existing standards and frameworks can be applied to the complex field of critical infrastructures and how a holistic view on critical infrastructures, e.g., on the physical and the cyber domain, can be achieved in risk and security management. Further, the Special Issue will also deal with innovative approaches tackling the aspect of interdependency and the influences among critical infrastructures. Facing today’s complex threat landscape, no comprehensive security or risk management in the context of critical infrastructures can go without considering this perspective to reach a high degree of sustainability and resilience for the critical infrastructures. Additionally, real-life use cases as well as examples from the practice together with empirical studies covering the application of approaches toward more sustainable and resilient critical infrastructures will also be welcome in this Special Issue.

Dr. Stefan Schauer
Guest Editor

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• critical infrastructures
• cyberphysical systems
• threat analysis
• impact assessment
• situational awareness
• infrastructure interdependencies
• interdependency graphs
• cascading effects
• mathematical models
• resilience