Research database

Most of European critical activities rely on networked Communication and Information Systems (CIS), highly interconnected. CIS performance could be jeopardized by incidents of various kinds. A multi-disciplinary approach is compulsory to leverage their dependability by an alliance of three approaches: -Modeling and simulation: DESEREC devises and develops innovative approaches and tools to design, model, simulate, and plan critical infrastructures to dramatically improve their resilience. -Detection: DESEREC integrates various detection mechanisms to ensure fast detection of severe incidents but also to detect complex ones, based on a combination of seemingly unrelated events, or on an abnormal behaviour. -Response: DESEREC provides a framework for computer-aided counter-measures initiatives to respond in a quick and appropriate way to a large range of incidents to mitigate the threats to the dependability and rapidly thwarts the problem. CIS Re-configuration is the utmost mechanism for their survivability. DESEREC will respond efficiently to the three families of incidents which can occurs on a critical system: Attacks from the outside, Intrinsic failures and Misbehavior or malicious internal use. As incidents act with different time scales and impact levels, DESEREC includes three response loops working on 3 different answering times to provide a suited answer: -A few seconds to locally respond to a severe and well-characterized incident and to launch emergency curative procedure to avoid escalation process or dramatic damage. -Some minutes to detect very complex problem and to readjust the system (i.e. through computer aided reactions) -Some hours to build a new configuration optimized to resist to a new situation and validated through modeling and simulation DESEREC approach, framework, and tools apply to critical communication and information systems in order to improve their resilience and their dependability.

• THALES COMMUNICATIONS S.A.