The CRUTIAL architecture for critical information infrastructures

In this chapter we discuss the susceptibility of critical information infrastructures to computer-borne attacks and faults, mainly due to their largely computerized nature, and to the pervasive interconnection of systems all over the world. We discuss how to overcome these problems and achieve resilience of critical information infrastructures, through adequate architectural constructs. The architecture we propose is generic and may come to be useful as a reference for modern critical information infrastructures. We discuss four main aspects: trusted components which induce prevention; middleware devices that achieve runtime automatic tolerance and protection; trustworthiness monitoring mechanisms detecting and adapting to non-predicted situations; organization-level security policies and access control models capable of securing global information flows. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.