@article {alcaraz2015CRI, title = {Critical Infrastructure Protection: Requirements and Challenges for the 21st Century}, journal = {International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection (IJCIP)}, volume = {8}, year = {2015}, month = {01/2015}, pages = {53{\textendash}66}, publisher = {Elsevier Science}, abstract = {

Critical infrastructures play a vital role in supporting modern society. The reliability, performance, continuous operation, safety, maintenance and protection of critical infrastructures are national priorities for countries around the world. This paper explores the vulnerabilities and threats facing modern critical infrastructures with special emphasis on industrial control systems, and describes a number of protection measures. The paper also discusses some of the challenging areas related to critical infrastructure protection such as governance and security management, secure network architectures, self-healing, modeling and simulation, wide-area situational awareness, forensics and learning, and trust management and privacy.

}, keywords = {Challenges, Critical Infrastructure Protection, Requirements, Risk, SCADA Systems, security}, issn = {1874-5482}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcip.2014.12.002}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1874548214000791}, author = {Cristina Alcaraz and Sherali Zeadally} } @article {1770, title = {Smart Control of Operational Threats in Control Substations}, journal = {Computers \& Security}, volume = {38}, year = {2013}, month = {OCT 2013}, pages = {14-27}, publisher = {Elsevier}, abstract = {

Any deliberate or unsuitable operational action in control tasks of critical infrastructures, such as energy generation, transmission and distribution systems that comprise sub-domains of a Smart Grid, could have a significant impact on the digital economy: without energy, the digital economy cannot live. In addition, the vast majority of these types of critical systems are configured in isolated locations where their control depends on the ability of a few, supposedly trustworthy, human operators. However, this assumption of reliabilty is not always true. Malicious human operators (criminal insiders) might take advantage of these situations to intentionally manipulate the critical nature of the underlying infrastructure. These criminal actions could be not attending to emergency events, inadequately responding to incidents or trying to alter the normal behaviour of the system with malicious actions. For this reason, in\ this paper we propose a smart response mechanism that controls human operators{\textquoteright} operational threats at all times. Moreover, the design of this mechanism allows the system to be able to not only evaluate by itself, the situation of a particular scenario but also to take control when areas are totally unprotected and/or isolated. The response mechanism, which is based on Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) for the constant monitoring of observed critical\ infrastructures, on reputation for controlling human operators{\textquoteright} actions, and on the ISA100.11a standard for alarm management, has been implemented and simulated to evaluate its feasibility for critical contexts.

}, keywords = {Digital Economy, Energy Control Systems, Reputation, security, Smart grids, wireless sensor networks}, issn = {0167-4048}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2013.03.013}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167404813000588}, author = {Javier Lopez and Cristina Alcaraz and Rodrigo Roman} } @article {AlcarazR2012, title = {Selecting key management schemes for WSN applications}, journal = {Computers \& Security}, volume = {31}, number = {38}, year = {2012}, month = {Nov 2012}, pages = {956{\textendash}966}, publisher = {Elsevier}, abstract = {

Key management in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is an active research topic. Due to the fact that a large number of key management schemes (KMS) have been proposed in the literature, it is not easy for a sensor network designer to know exactly which KMS best fits in a particular WSN application. In this article, we offer a comprehensive review on how the application requirements and the properties of various key management schemes influence each other. Based on this review, we show that the KMS plays a critical role in determining the security performance of a WSN network with given application requirements. We also develop a method that allows the network designers to select the most suitable KMS for a specific WSN network setting. In addition, the article also addresses the issues on the current state-of-the-art research on the KMS for homogeneous (i.e. non-hierarchical) networks to provide solutions for establishing link-layer keys in various WSN applications and scenarios.

}, keywords = {security}, issn = {0167-4048}, doi = {10.1016/j.cose.2012.07.002}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167404812001034}, author = {Cristina Alcaraz and Javier Lopez and Rodrigo Roman and Hsiao-Hwa Chen} } @inproceedings {alcaraz2012b, title = {Smart Grid Privacy: Issues and Solutions}, booktitle = {21st International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)}, year = {2012}, month = {Jul 2012}, pages = {1-5}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}, organization = {IEEE Computer Society}, address = {Munich, Germany}, abstract = {

Migration to an electronically controlled electrical grid to transmit, distribute, and deliver power to consumers has helped enhance the reliability and efficiency of conventional electricity systems. At the same time, this digitally enabled technology called the Smart Grid has brought new challenges to businesses and consumers alike. A key component of such a grid is the smart-metering technology, which is used to collect energy consumption data from homes and transmitting it back to power distributors. A crucial concern is the privacy related to the collection and use of energy consumption data. We present an analysis of Smart Grid privacy issues and discuss recently proposed solutions that can protect the privacy of Smart Grid users.

}, keywords = {Computer architecture, Data privacy, Electricity, Home appliances, privacy, security, Smart grids}, isbn = {978-1-4673-1543-2}, doi = {10.1109/ICCCN.2012.6289304}, url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=\&arnumber=6289304\&contentType=Conference+Publications\&openedRefinements\%3D*\%26pageNumber\%3D7\%26rowsPerPage\%3D100\%26queryText\%3D\%28smart+grid\%29}, author = {F. Siddiqui and S. Zeadally and Cristina Alcaraz and S. Galvao} }