Railway System Failure Scenario Analysis

• Published in: Critical Information Infrastructures Security Vol. 10242; pp. 213 - 225
• Main Authors: Temple, William G., Li, Yuan, Tran, Bao Anh N., Liu, Yan, Chen, Binbin
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2017; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Railway; Risk assessment; Security assessment; System modelling
• ISBN: 3319713671; 9783319713670
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-71368-7_18

Cyber security has emerged as an important issue for urban railway systems (URS) due to the increasing usage of information and communication technologies (ICT). As a safety-critical public infrastructure with complex, interconnected, and often legacy systems, URS pose challenges for stakeholders seeking to understand cyber threats and their impact, and prioritize investments and hardening efforts. However, other critical infrastructure industries such as the energy sector offer best practices, risk assessment methodologies, and tools that may be both useful and transferable to the railway domain. In this work we consider one successful security initiative from the energy sector in North America, the development of common failure scenarios and impact analysis (NESCOR failure scenarios), and assess their applicability and utility in URS. We use a publicly-available software tool that supports failure scenario analysis to assess example failures on railway supervisory control systems and identify directions for further improving railway failure scenario analysis.