Critical Telecommunications Infrastructure Protection in Brazil: Application of MI²C

Abstract. This article describes the use of Methodology for Critical Infrastructure Identification-MI²C to identify the critical part of telecommunication infrastructure in the scope of the XV Pan American and Parapan American Game held in Rio de Janeiro in July and August 2007.

1       Introduction

This article is organized as follows: section 2 presents the Methodology for Critical Infrastructure Identification-MI²C, section 3 presents the phase-by-phase results of applying MI²C within the scope of the XV Pan American and Parapan American Games and, finally, section 4 presents the conclusions.

2       Methodology for Critical Infrastructure Identification – MI²C[1]

This methodology, one of the set of methodologies presented in a previous issue of info@CITEL [1], has been defined with eight phases (see Fig. 1):

·    Phase 1: Telecommunications services identification;
·    Phase 2: Definition of aspects for service evaluation;
·    Phase 3: Definition of aspect criticality levels;
·    Phase 4: Definition of the aspect weights;
·    Phase 5: Analysis of service criticality levels;
·    Phase 6: Mapping of critical telecommunications services;
·    Phase 7: Identification of telecommunications network infrastructure;
·    Phase 8: Mapping of critical telecommunications infrastructure.

Fig. . MI²C phases

3      Application of MI²C within the scope of the Pan/Parapan 2007[2]

MI²C was used to define the critical portion of the telecom infrastructure in the scope of the XV Pan American and the Parapan American Games (Pan/Parapan 2007) held in Rio de Janeiro in July and August 2007.

3.1      Phase 1 – Telecommunications services identification

Description: The main objective here is to identify each and every telecommunications service, considering the scope of the application.

Application: Anatel and the Organizing Committee of Pan/Parapan 2007 (CO-RIO) were invited to participate in multidisciplinary group discussions to identify all of the relevant telecommunications services (and the correspondent service providers) that could be used during the events, either by athletes, coaches, event staff and organizers (security, medical first-aid, cleaning, etc.), representatives of local authorities (fire, ambulance and police services), emergency rescue services spectators and the resident population.

3.2      Phase 2 – Definition of aspects for service evaluation

Description: The aspects that will be used to evaluate the services identified in Phase 1 are based on three distinct areas of interest: service users, society and the State; some of them are quantitative while the others are qualitative.

Application: Meetings were held with Anatel, CO-RIO, researchers, telecommunications specialists, information security specialists and professors, amongst others, to identify the relevant aspects. Table 1 illustrates the results from this phase.

Table 1. Relevant aspects to be analyzed for the Pan/Parapan 2007.

3.3      Phase 3 – Definition of aspect criticality levels

Description: In this phase, the level of criticality (qualitative and quantitative) for each aspect is defined to allow the analyses of every service defined in Phase 1. These levels of criticality should reflect the influence of the telecommunications services for each aspect. There are several ways to proceed with this definition, from a simple and generic classification (using 3 levels: high, medium and low), to more complex classifications (using n levels, where n is odd) if a greater granularity is required.

Application: This analysis was performed during multidisciplinary discussion group meetings with participants from Anatel, CO-RIO, researchers, telecommunications specialists and, information security specialists, amongst others. Three levels of criticality were defined: “High”, “Medium” and “Low” (see Table 2).

Table 2. Levels of criticality for the different aspects considered.

3.4      Phase 4 – Definition of aspect weights

Description: In this phase the different scenarios that can take place in a particular country are mapped. Using aspects weighting it is possible to map not only the real situation of the country, but also exercise hypothetical scenarios as well; i.e. it is possible to establish different scenarios by simply adjusting the aspects weighting.

Application: A group of specialists and analysts held meetings to assign the aspects weightings. Since there are no extraordinary events taking place in Brazil, the weights were set to “1” for all aspects, except coverage, which was set to “0”, as this factor is not relevant at this moment and in this scope (see Table 3).

Table 3. Definition of the weightings used to create scenarios.

3.5      Phase 5 – Analysis of service criticality levels

Description: This phase is responsible for analyzing the level of criticality for each telecommunication service with respect to each aspect.

Application: This analysis was done by multidisciplinary discussion groups in workshops. Some simple examples of questions that were discussed are shown below:

·    Safety and health aspects: How does the telecommunication service under analysis influence the health and safety aspect?

·    How critical is the service analyzed in the perspective of this aspect?

·    Does this service contribute to, assist or facilitate this aspect?

These simple questions were asked for each telecommunication service identified in Phase 1. All the services were analyzed from the perspective of each aspect (see Table 4). This is one of the most time consuming phases of the methodology.

Table 4. Analysis of criticality.

3.6      Phase 6 – Mapping of the critical telecommunications services

Description: The main objective of this phase is to convert the qualitative values to quantitative ones in order to prioritize the telecommunication services. The method of calculation employed can be a simple arithmetic average or Analytical Hierarchy Process-AHP methodology, or other one method that attains the desired objective.

Application: High, Medium and Low were mapped to the values 1, 2 and 3. Subsequently the calculation was performed and the ranking was defined based on the average. The results are shown in Table 5.

Table 5. Classification of level of criticality.

3.7      Phase 7 – Identification of telecommunications network infrastructure

Description: Identification of the telecommunications network infrastructure used by critical services.

Application: Through workshops, meetings and questionnaires, and with the support of the Brazilian telecom operators, the telecommunications network infrastructure was identified. The integration between different types of networks, such fixed and mobile services, must be considered in this phase.

To analyze the answers to the questionnaire, a semi-quantitative approach was used, identifying information such as points that concentrate traffic and functionalities, long distance strategic traffic routing and infrastructure sharing. The 25 types of evaluation criteria were grouped into 6 categories: Pan/Parapan 2007 sites, Infrastructure, Transmission, Switching #1, Switching #2 and Switching #3. Table 6 illustrates the criteria for each category.

Table 6. Criteria per category.

Adopting this approach (categories vs. criteria) serves a twofold objective: a) to minimize the presence of mistakes due to answer interpretation and b) to minimize the number of criteria comparisons.

3.8      Phase 8 – Mapping of critical telecommunications infrastructure

Description: In this phase the network infrastructure used by each and every critical service is mapped in order to define the critical telecommunications infrastructure. Performing this phase also requires an in-depth knowledge of the telecommunications field and the relevant equipment that supports the services. The required information was obtained through workshops, questionnaires and study groups that included telecommunications specialists and the people responsible for the critical service that is being analyzed. In this phase the level of granularity can be adjusted according to one’s needs. The critical network infrastructure found can be detailed at a high level (e.g. building level) or a low-level (e.g. board level). Either way, all critical services should always be included in the critical infrastructure.

Application: The first step of is to attribute weights for each category in the model formulated in the previous phase. Fig. 4 shows the natural top-down approach for prioritizing the categories by importance: the base of the pyramid (infrastructure) has the highest weighting since, if it fails, all the categories above it will also fail. The weights and normalization factors adopted for each category are presented in Table 7. The normalization factor was introduced into the model to eliminate the distortion caused by different categories having different numbers of criteria.

Fig. . Top-down approach to prioritize the categories.

Table 7. Weights and normalization factor per category.

To obtain the final scores, needed for the prioritization of the sites, the following formula was used:

4       Results

Table 8 shows the 10 (ten) highest ranked stations among all stations analyzed. This information allows a more efficient resource allocation for infrastructure protection. For security reasons, the real names of stations and operators have been omitted.

Table 8. Top ten stations ranked.

5       Conclusions

The importance of critical telecommunication infrastructure identification cannot be underestimated, since is the first step to an effective infrastructure protection program. For this reason, it is important to use a systematic approach – like the one embodied in MI²C – to correctly identify the most critical parts of the telecommunication infrastructure. This article has presented the application of the Methodology for Critical Infrastructure Identification (MI²C), for identifying the critical part of the telecommunication infrastructure used during XV Pan American and Parapan American Games.

References

1.      Critical telecommunication infrastructure protection project, info@CITEL, March 2007 issue.

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João Henrique de Augustinis Franco, Fundação CPqD
Regina Maria De Felice Souza, Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações
Sérgio Luís Ribeiro, Fundação CPqD