Kopylec, J., D’Amico, A., & Goodall, J. (2007, March). Visualizing cascading failures in critical cyber infrastructures. In International Conference on Critical Infrastructure Protection (pp. 351-364). Springer US.
Abstract: This article explores the relationship between physical and cyber critical infrastructures, focusing on how threats and disruptions in the physical infrastructures can cascade into failures within cyber infrastructure. Through interviews with critical infrastructure protection experts and practitioners, we examined the issues in dealing with cyber infrastructure, including challenges with the management and organization of massive amounts of data that is geographically and logically disparate. Based on that understanding, we designed a system, named Cascade, for visualizing the cascading effects of physical infrastructure failures into the cyber infrastructure. Cascade will provide situational awareness to people who plan for and respond to crises related to Information and Communication Technology. Cascade shows how threats to physical infrastructures such as power, transportation, and communications can affect the networked enterprises that comprise the cyber infrastructure. Our approach applies the concept of punctualization from Actor- Network Theory to expose only the relevant disruptive effects and as an organizing principle for large collections of disparate infrastructure data. In particular, we show how to expose the critical relationships between the physical and cyber infrastructures. We discuss the avail- ability of infrastructure data, and how this information can be depicted visually to maximize comprehension. This article also addresses the is- sue of representing both the logical and geospatial relationships within the cyber infrastructure. The resulting system design provides access to the cyber infrastructure’s dependencies on other critical infrastructures, for use during disaster planning or crisis response.
