PCSCI 2023

International Workshop on Physical and Cyber Security in Interdependent Critical Infrastructures (PCSCI 2023 )

to be held in conjunction with the 18 ^th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

(ARES 2023 – http://www.ares-conference.eu )

August 29 – September 1, 2023

Over the last decade, critical infrastructures (CIs) have become more and more interconnected with and interdependent on each other and have evolved into highly complex CI networks. In particular when looking at metropolitan areas, where thousands or even millions of people live in a geographically narrow space, the uninterrupted and failure-free operation of those CIs is vital to maintain essential services and the social life. One of the core issues driving these interdependencies among CIs is the digitalization trend across multiple sectors and the accompanying fusion of the physical and the cyber space. This increasing number of interacting cyber-physical systems open up new threat vectors, which make them vulnerable to attacks from different domains. Thus, a holistic view on CIs and their interdependencies becomes more important to identify potential threats from the physical and the cyber domains.

This workshop aims at bringing together security experts from different fields and discuss about novel concepts and approaches to tackle current issues in CI protection. In this context, we want to look at the potential cascading effects an incident within a CI might have on dependent infrastructures, economy as well as the people living in a metropolitan area. Besides results from theoretical work, we would also encourage the presentation of technological solutions (e.g., prototypes) implementing those methodologies as well as use case scenarios and empirical studies, which provide insights in real-life applications and the occurring problems.

Related Projects

PRAETORIAN (H2020)

PRAETORIAN strategic goal is to increase the security and resilience of European CIs, facilitating the coordinated protection of interrelated CI against combined physical and cyber threats. To that end, the project will provide a multidimensional (economical, technological, policy, societal) yet installation-specific toolset comprising: (i) a Physical Situation Awareness system, (ii) a Cyber Situation Awareness system; (iii) a Hybrid Situation Awareness system, which will include digital twins of the infrastructure under protection; and (iv) a Coordinated Response system. The PRAETORIAN toolset will support the security managers of Critical Infrastructures (CI) in their decision making to anticipate and withstand potential cyber, physical or combined security threats to their own infrastructures and other interrelated CIs that could have a severe impact on their performance and/or the security of the population in their vicinity. The project will specifically tackle (i.e. prevent, detect, response and, in case of a declared attack, mitigate) human-made cyber and physical attacks or natural disasters affecting CIs. It will also address how an attack or incident in a specific CI can jeopardise the normal operation of other neighbouring/interrelated CIs, and how to make all of them more resilient, by predicting cascading effects and proposing a unified response among CIs and assisting First Responder teams.

PRECINCT (H2020)

PRECINCT aims to connect private and public CI stakeholders in a geographical area to a common cyber-physical security management approach which will yield a protected territory for citizens and infrastructures, a ‘PRECINCT’ that can be replicated efficiently for a safer Europe and will deliver:
1. A PRECINCT Framework Specification for systematic CIs security and resilience management fulfilling industry requirements.
2. A Cross-Facility collaborative cyber-physical Security and Resilience management Infrastructure enabling CI stakeholder communities to create AI-enabled PRECINCT Ecosystems and enhanced resilience support services.
3. A vulnerability assessment tool that uses Serious Games to identify potential vulnerabilities to cascading effects and to quantify resilience enhancement measures.
4. PRECINCT’s Digital Twins to represent the CIs network topology and metadata profiles, applying closed-loop Machine Learning techniques to detect violations and provide optimised response and mitigation measures and automated forensics.
5. Smart PRECINCT Ecosystems, deployed in four large-scale Living Labs and Transferability Validation Demonstrators, will provide measurement-based evidence of the targeted advantages and will realize Digital Twins corresponding to the CIs located therein, include active participation of emergency services and city administrations with results feeding back to the Digital Twins developments.
6. Sustainability related outputs including Capacity Building, Dissemination, Exploitation, Resilience Strategy, Policy/Standardisation recommendations.

SUNRISE

The SUNRISE project aims at investigating the link between the resilience of Critical Infrastructures (CIs) and pandemics, building an active collaboration of CIs across Europe to share best practices and jointly tackle future pandemics. This will be achieved by: (1) Identifying pandemic-specific vital services and CIs, their dependencies, risks, cascading effects, and effective measures to tackle them at European level. (2) Developing a comprehensive strategy (TRL8) and four innovative tools (TRL7) ensuring greater availability, reliability, security, robustness, trustworthiness, cost-effectiveness, climate-friendliness, and continuity of pandemic-specific vital services in Europe: Tools for risk-based access control, resource demand prediction and management, cyber-physical resilience, and remote infrastructure inspection. (3) demonstrating the results in operational environments of the CIs while tackling some of their biggest pain points exposed by the current pandemic. (4) Promoting the approach across Europe to ensure a united front and resilience of CIs to pandemics. Further, legal, ethical, societal, economic, and climate aspects will be carefully considered, ensuring that our results address not only the needs of the CIs, but also those of our society.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline	May 04, 2023
Author Notification	June 07, 2023
Proceedings Version	June 19, 2022
ARES EU Symposium	August 29, 2023
ARES Conference	August 29 – September 01, 2023

Workshop Chair

Stefan Schauer
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria
stefan.schauer@ait.ac.at

Eva Maria Muñoz Navarro
ETRA Investigación y Desarrollo S.A., Spain
emunoz.etraid@grupoetra.com

Frederic Guyomard
EDF R&D, France
frederic.guyomard@edf.fr

Jenny Rainbird
Inlecom, Belgium
jenny.rainbird@inlecomsystems.com

Program Committee

Stefan Schauer, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Austria
Sandra König, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Austria
Florian Piekert, DLR – German Aerospace Center, Germany
Tamara Hadjina, Končar – Digital, Croatia
Lazaros Papadopoulos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Dimitrios Soudris, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Abdelkader Shaaban, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Austria
Lorcan Connolly, Research Driven Solutions, Ireland
Tim Stelkens-Kobsch, DLR – German Aerospace Center, Germany
Martin Latzenhofer, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Austria
Meilin Schaper, DLR – German Aerospace Center, Germany
Antonios Karteris, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Stefan Rass, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Nils Carstengerdes, DLR – German Aerospace Center, Germany
Andrei-Vlad Predescu, DLR – German Aerospace Center, Germany
Hilke Boumann, DLR – German Aerospace Center, Germany
Jenny Rainbird, Inlecom, United Kingdom
Eva Maria Muñoz Navarro, ETRA Investigación y Desarrollo S.A., Spain
Frederic Guyomard, EDF, France

Submission Guidelines

The submission guidelines valid for the workshop are the same as for the ARES conference. They can be found at https://www.ares-conference.eu/submission/ .