Pictures of the Future    Spring 2006

Protecting Key Assets

Key infrastructure elements must be secured against outages, damage and sabotage. Siemens offers comprehensive solutions.

From healthcare and power generation to water supply, transportation, and industrial production, to telecommunications and emergency services such as fire and police departments—all of these areas are vitally important for today’s society. At the same time, they are exposed to a wide variety of threats. Technical failures and human error, including faulty operation, can cause breakdowns. So can natural phenomena. Storms and flooding can lead to downed power lines, transformer stations can be destroyed by lightning, and roads and railways left impassable by high water. That’s exactly what happened in Switzerland in September 2003, when a falling tree happened to damage a 380 kV power line. The result was a widespread failure of the power grid in Italy—a blackout similar to the one that had hit the U.S. and Canada only a month earlier (see Pictures of the Future, Spring 2004, Network Stability).

Another threat is crime. This includes not only terrorist attacks, but worms and viruses on the Internet, as well as hackers who illegally log on to corporate computer networks. "It’s certainly possible that hackers could disable the power supply or subway system of an entire city if they succeeded in manipulating control signals," explains Sven Lehmberg, head of Intrusion Prevention for Products and Solutions at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT). Information technology is increasingly being used to control infrastructure elements, including the networks of electricity suppliers, railway operators and emergency services.

Internet worms, for instance, have already impaired the operating ability of U.S. power companies on several occasions. When this happens, control and monitoring systems are no longer fully serviceable. As a result, messages can’t be displayed and it becomes impossible to correct malfunctions or compensate for them in time, a scenario that means greater risk of power outages in a service area.

Homeland security technologies are designed to help protect infrastructures and guarantee their reliability. These solutions include the typical security technologies for information and communications systems: encryption and access control mechanisms (including role-based systems and identity management), authentication processes using smart cards, secure RFID tags and biometric methods (fingerprints and voice or 3D facial recognition, for example).

But comprehensive security solutions also include security-enhancing technologies. "These are technologies that weren’t specially developed for security applications, but that can nevertheless play a key role in creating a security system," says Alla Heidenreich, head of the Homeland Security research project at Siemens Corporate Technology.

These technologies include sensor systems for monitoring physical states, such as multi-purpose radar sensors and fiber-optic sensors for measuring physical quantities or identifying dangerous substances.

Such systems can be used to inspect transport containers, for example, where sensors supply data regarding the condition of a container’s interior during loading and unloading. For this purpose, Siemens researchers have developed sensors that can be used to quickly carry out automatic, on-site analysis of dangerous chemical and biological substances in air and liquids.

Mobile ad-hoc networks and self-optimizing communications networks are also security-enhancing technologies. They can help to maintain communication even if an infrastructure is partly disabled. Within a network of this kind, mobile devices such as cell phones and laptops can immediately establish connections with one another, even without an overall infrastructure (see Pictures of the Future, Spring 2005, Fusing Ad Hoc and P2P). This is similar to the structure of the Internet, which is organized so robustly that a total failure is hardly possible.

Each cell phone or laptop in a redundant network serves not just as a transmitting and receiving station but also as a router for other participants. Mesh networks, for example, are organized with a certain degree of redundancy. In the event that a transmitter fails or becomes overloaded, a search is performed for the nearest available device. This technology is the basis for what will be the world’s largest urban WLAN network. The network is currently being built in Tempe, Arizona. It will cover over 100 km², an area in which about 400 lamp posts are being turned into Internet transmission masts.

In power grids, too, the chances of an outage are reduced when networks of power lines are linked. If one connection fails, there are generally several alternative lines to help maintain an uninterrupted supply of electricity. The more "tightly woven" the network is, the more secure it is. According to a 2005 analysis conducted by the Association of German Network Operators (VDN), Germany has the most secure power supply in Europe, thanks to a closely linked network with short transmission routes and power plants distributed throughout the entire country. In 2004, for instance, power outages affecting German customers totaled 23 minutes on average. The figure in France was 59 minutes, in Italy 91 minutes, and customers in the U.S. faced more than 200 minutes without power on average.

Creating comprehensive security solutions for critical infrastructures requires technologies from a number of fields, and security-enhancing technologies have to be combined with security technologies typically used with IT systems. What’s more, security concepts that boost power-supply reliability must be taken into account early on in the product development stage. Summing up the mission of the Homeland Security unit, Michael Munzert says, "Our objective is to combine the technological expertise we have at our disposal at Siemens Corporate Technology to design innovative security solutions for critical infrastructures."
                                                                                                               Sylvia Trage