A Novel Approach for Modeling Security Aspects of Physical Infrastructures

The infrastructures like water, power, school, transportation and communication systems are essentials for daily life activities and their protection is very important especially in the context of rapidly growing international terrorism. Protection of physical infrastructure requires the deep understanding of the infrastructure building blocks, identification of threats, vulnerabilities and risks. Implementations of effective and efficient techniques for the protection of physical infrastructure are subject to the knowledge of multiple domains. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach addresses the problem of complexity and effectively represents the application structure and behavior within a particular domain. Existing techniques seems to be lacking in providing a common approach for modeling different types of infrastructure. In this context, we study the characteristics of physical infrastructure's protection and proposed Unified Modeling Language (UML) based meta-models. The proposed meta-models aid in defining the different aspects of infrastructure and understand its organization and behavior. On the basis of given meta-models, UML models can be derived to represent the infrastructure protection systems, threats, vulnerabilities, assets and relationships among them.