Critical infrastructure protection tools : classification and comparison 1

Recent research has shown that Critical Infrastructures are highly interconnected, whether they are manifested as processes, systems, facilities, assets, or services. The modeling and analysis of these interdependencies is a research field with an increasing interest. Dependency and risk analysis of these interconnections can be a computationally intensive problem but can also yield useful results that aid risk assessments and offer risk mitigation alternatives. This paper identifies and classifies most existing tools, frameworks, and methodologies that can serve as a common baseline for threat identification and risk assessment. Then, it compares their attributes and technologies. Conceptual and qualitative studies about infrastructure interdependencies, as well as their modeling and simulation approaches, are also examined. The comparison of the tools is based on two different aspects, i.e., the purpose (i.e. functionality goal) that each tool serves, as well as its technical modeling approach. For tools that are not publicly available, the classification used information from published articles and reports.