FINSTIX: A Cyber-Physical Data Model for Financial Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

Cyber-physical security of financial institutions is a critical and sensitive topic. In this context, the FINSEC project aims to design and build a reference architecture for the integrated physical and cyber security of financial institutions. To make feasible, the interactions among the different services of the FINSEC platform, a proper data model defining the exchanged information semantic is fundamental. One of the objectives of the FINSEC project is to integrate cyber and physical security measures in the financial services industry. To do so, the data model must consider both cyber and physical systems. In this paper, the authors present FINSTIX, namely the data model adopted in the FINSEC platform. In particular, they extended the Structured Threat Information eXpression (STIX) standard creating custom objects to describe the financial organization’s infrastructure and then to integrate cyber and physical security measures. The paper also reports an example of the use of FINSTIX in a relevant use case scenario.