Cascading Effects of Common-Cause Failures in Critical Infrastructures

Overview & Synopsis

One of the most challenging problems in critical infrastructure protection is the assessment and mitigation of cascading failures across infrastructures. In previous research, we have proposed a model for assessing the cumulative security risk of cascading threats due to high-order dependencies between infrastructures. However, recent empirical studies indicate that common-cause failures may result in extremely high impact situations, which may be comparable with or even more devastating than the cascading effects of high-order dependencies. This paper presents an extension to our model, which permits the assessment of the risk arising from complex situations involving multiple cascading failures triggered by major or concurrent common-cause events. The paper also discusses a realistic scenario that is used as a test case for the model extension.