Abstract
Understanding the origin of infrastructure failures and their propagation patterns in critical infrastructures can provide important information for secure and reliable infrastructure design. Among the critical infrastructures, the Communication and Information Technology Infrastructure (CITI) is crucial, as it provides the basic mechanism for sharing information among all infrastructures. Failures in CITI can disrupt the effective functionality of the other critical infrastructures. Conversely, failures in the other infrastructures can also propagate to CITI, and hence disrupt the operation of all systems. In this study, we used public domain failure reports to identify the origin of these failures and their propagation patterns. We analysed 347 infrastructure failure cases reported from 1994 to 2005 in the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) RISKS forum. We studied these reports to determine the causes of infrastructure failures and their impact on CITI and other critical infrastructures in a number of dimensions, such as the origin of failures, impacts of failures in spatial and temporal dimensions, their effect on public safety and how failures propagate from one infrastructure to another. The results obtained from the analysis of these real-life failure cases, which occurred over a considerable timespan, should be useful to researchers and practitioners. This paper also discusses the difficulties and limitations of using public domain data in academic research.
Highlights
Modern Communication and Information Technology Infrastructure (CITI) provides key links and services to many other critical infrastructures [1], such as telecommunication, electricity, water supply, oil and gas networks, transportation, financial services, etc
We have identified interdependencies between CITI and other infrastructures based on some key factors, such as, origin of failures, impact of failures in spatial and temporal dimensions, affect of failure on public safety and their propagation from CITI to other critical infrastructures and vice versa
The linear increase of CITI and other critical infrastructures failure reports can be inferred to imply that these infrastructures are increasingly becoming more dependent on CITI services
Summary
Modern Communication and Information Technology Infrastructure (CITI) provides key links and services to many other critical infrastructures [1], such as telecommunication, electricity, water supply, oil and gas networks, transportation, financial services, etc. Failures in other infrastructures can propagate to CITI and disrupt the operation of many of these interconnected systems. Such disruptions may lead to huge disturbances in the public life of modern nation states. One of the prerequisites for smooth operation of these interconnected infrastructures is to gain understanding of their interdependencies. By studying the origin of the infrastructure related failures and their propagation patterns, we can develop a better understanding of their interdependencies. Such understanding can be useful for decision makers and infrastructure operators for policymaking and system design [3]
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