Information Assurance in Critical Infrastructures via Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Information assurance in critical infrastructure is an issue that has been addressed generally focusing on real-time or quasi real-time monitoring of the critical infrastructure; so that action could be undertaken when anomalies arise, to avoid more severe consequences to the infrastructure. In this paper, we relax the hypothesis of intervening when anomalies are detected: we focus on sensed data survivability. Specifically, we study this problem in a specific critical infrastructure: pipelines. The problem we introduce is how to place sensors in such a way that the sensed data related to the monitoring of the pipeline will survive even in presence of a partial destruction of the infrastructure. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we introduce the problem of sensed data survivability in critical infrastructure. In this framework, the goal is to have the sensed data to survive to the infrastructure failure, so that the phenomena that lead to the failure could be better understood and possibly tackled in similar deployment. Second, we provide a model that allows to produce an optimal network topology with respect to the level of information assurance desired, while satisfying deployment constraints, such as available bandwidth and available energy of the sensors. We believe that the work addressed in this paper could foster further research in the field of information assurance in critical infrastructure.