Improved resilience of Critical Infratsructures AgainsT LArge scale transNational and sysTemic rISks

The reliable operation of critical infrastructures (CIs) is a prerequisite for the integrity and resilience of vital elements of our society that help ensure the security, well-being and economic prosperity of Europe, its citizens and businesses. However, CIs have become highly complex and operate in a rapidly evolving social, technological and business environment. Increasing digitization generates new vulnerabilities, including those that are transmitted through individuals and employees, either intentionally through insider threats or through human error and social engineering. Moreover, as CIs are increasingly interconnected and dependent on each other, disruptions in one CI can have severe and long-lasting cascading effects on other CIs that are essential to the continuity of critical social and economic activities, including across multiple sectors and countries. This increases the attack surface, as well as the scale and significance of the impacts of attacks.

In this emerging security landscape, European critical infrastructures (ECIs) are increasingly becoming the target of new threat categories and hybrid attacks powered by technological innovations. However, little research has been done on large-scale, transnational and cross-domain coordinated attacks. More importantly, large-scale vulnerability assessment and systemic risk analysis of ECIs, taking into account risks from major natural or man-made hazards and complex cyber-physical-human (CPH) threats, as well as the consequences of system-wide collapse, have never been addressed before. A fundamental challenge in governing systemic risks is to understand the system as a complex web of individual and institutional actors with different and often competing interests, values and worldviews.

ATLANTIS assesses and addresses systemic risks to major natural hazards and complex attacks that could disrupt vital functions of European society. ATLANTIS' mission is to improve the resilience of the interconnected ECI exposed to combined, large-scale, existing and emerging, constantly evolving CPH threats and hazards. By providing sustainable and future-proof security solutions, ATLANTIS helps public and private actors to ensure the continuity of vital operations, while minimizing the cascading effects on the infrastructure itself, the environment, other CIs and the affected population.

VICOMTECH's role in ATLANTIS is twofold. On the one hand, the development of a cyber risk assessment methodology for network communications. This system takes into account both real-time risks based on AI models and cascading effects. On the other hand, the generation of explainability and interpretability tools for AI experts to assess the safety of trained neural network models by exploring the behavior of the model's internal filters.