CS3660 Critical Infrastructure Protection

Critical infrastructure is one of the cornerstones of Homeland Security in the United States. While we intuitively understand the importance of our infrastructure, we understand far less about what is critical and what we can do to make infrastructure more resilient. The purpose of this course is to give you a framework for understanding and the tools to analyze critical infrastructures. We take a “system of systems” approach that involves understanding the basics of how infrastructures function and how complexity theory and related policies influence their structure. We study risk and its applications to critical infrastructures. Finally, we provide a framework that will allow you to scope, model, and then analyze an infrastructure from both the attacker and defender points of view resulting in recommendations based on risk and considering the return on investment in terms of risk reduction.

 

Prerequisite

NS3180

Lecture Hours

4

Lab Hours

0

Course Learning Outcomes

• Understand basic concepts of risk and risk management methodologies pertaining to critical infrastructure.
• Apply game theory methods to critical infrastructures to inform risk-based policies for protecting those infrastructures.
• Model critical infrastructures as the system and system of systems level for use in analysis.
• Understand complexity theories as they relate to critical infrastructures and the development of policies that shape infrastructures.
• Understand resiliency and what it means with respect to infrastructure protection.
• Develop metrics for “return on investment” for critical infrastructures.
• Develop a working knowledge of how infrastructure systems work and what threatens the function of those systems.