Conceptual Framework for Hybrid Situational Awareness in Critical Port Infrastructures

Over the last years, critical infrastructures have become the target of highly sophisticated attacks causing severe damage to economic and social life. In most cases, such attacks are utilizing combined attack vectors from both the physical and the cyber domain. The magnitude of the consequences is often increased by cascading effects in both domains, even further amplifying each other. In this article, we present a framework implementing a holistic approach towards situational awareness for critical infrastructures. This Hybrid Situational Awareness (HSA) combines information coming from the physical as well as from the cyber domain and is able to identify potential cascading effects of an incident. In this context, the hybrid approach particularly focuses on the inter-domain propagation of a failure, i.e., the effects of a physical incident on the cyber domain and vice versa. We will show how such a Hybrid Situational Awareness can be implemented and illustrate its functionality based on a complex attack scenario.