Impact Propagation in Airport Systems

The effective protection of critical infrastructure against cyber and physical security threats involves many different steps from initially the identification of risks to finally the implementation of counter measures in the infrastructure. To derive counter measures and to come to intelligent decisions facing the identified risks, the impact calculation plays a central role. The impact of a specific threat can propagate through the systems of the infrastructure and thus needs to be analysed carefully. In this paper, the role of impact propagation of cyber-physical threats for infrastructure protection is discussed, exemplified for airport systems. In the ongoing EU-H2020 project SATIE (Security of Air Transport Infrastructure of Europe) a toolkit is developed containing two tools for impact propagation, namely the Business Impact Assessment (BIA) and the Impact Propagation Simulation (IPS). Both tools are described and for a small test case the propagation of a cyber threat and the transformation into a physical threat is demonstrated in a network representation as well as an agent-based model of the airport’s systems employing the IPS.