CRUTIAL:: The blueprint of a reference critical information infrastructure architecture

In the past few decades, critical infrastructures have become largely computerised and interconnected all over the world. This generated the problem of achieving resilience of critical information infrastructures against computer-borne attacks and severe faults. Governments and industry have been pushing an immense research effort in information and systems security, but we believe the complexity of the problem prevents it from being solved using classical security methods. The paper focuses on the computer systems behind electrical utility infrastructures. It proposes the blueprint of a distributed systems architecture that we believe may come to be useful as a reference for modern critical information infrastructures in general. The architecture is instantiated with a set of classes of techniques and algorithms, based on paradigms providing resilience to faults and attacks in an automatic way.