Policy challenges in building dependability in global infrastructures

Abstract

[This paper was given at Compsec 2002, in London, on 30 October 2002]. Global or continental critical infrastructures — including electric power, telecommunications, and the Internet — are now the control plane for advanced economies. The occasional failures of these key infrastructures illustrate not only our dependence, but also the unanticipated interdependencies between systems. For example, the 1998 failure of a single telecommunications satellite, Galaxy 4, led to an outage of nearly 90% of all pagers in the United States, while also causing a number of unanticipated failures: many banking and financial services (credit card purchases, automated teller machines) were interrupted, as was communications with doctors and emergency workers [1]. With awareness of economic and social dependence on these distributed infrastructures has come a growing concern about their reliability and security. Defense against deliberate attack — critical infrastructure protection — emerged as part of the US national security posture in the mid-1990s with the work of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure, and was codified by Presidential Decision Directive 63 in 1998. Other nations are also beginning to develop national strategies for infrastructure protection. Reliability is more than protection against deliberate attack. An accidental cut of a fiber optic trunk shut down air traffic control along the east coast of the US for a day. A cascading series of events, starting with a tree limb falling, caused much of the western US to lose electricity. The challenge of improving the reliability of global networked infrastructures presents us with significant analytical and decision-making complexities, with both technical and policy relevant dimensions [2]. This paper — using principally examples from the Internet and other distributed IT systems — presents two perspectives on these complexities. First is to present critical global infrastructures as complex adaptive systems, which share certain characteristics that policy makers and managers need to account for. Secondly, the balance of the paper outlines five major dimensions of the analytical and decision-making complexity, and presents the research and policy-making agendas that need to be addressed if we are to significantly improve the reliability of global infrastructures. Neither of these perspectives is purely technical or engineering based. Success in increasing the reliability of global infrastructures will require much more analytically sophisticated research in, among other topics, the issue areas identified here — in addition to ongoing technology-based research.