Critical Infrastructure Protection
Working with government agencies and industry to develop techniques that deter adversaries and mitigate risk.
MITRE-Harris Poll
Public Perceptions on Securing Critical Infrastructure
Threats to our nation’s critical infrastructure by malicious state actors and criminals are dramatically escalating. The operational technology systems that underpin our daily lives, including water, telecommunications, transportation, energy, and natural gas are regularly targeted and compromised for strategic, tactical, and financial objectives.
We’re working with government agencies and critical infrastructure operators to ensure resiliency, while developing techniques to deter adversaries and mitigate risk.
So when we talk about cybersecurity, we often think about the modern IT systems that we use every day. But if you look at critical infrastructure systems, many of them have technology in them that was designed 20, 30, 40 years ago. And when you take something that's old and likely vulnerable to all range of different attacks, and hook it up to the internet, it's really a recipe for disaster. All the tools that we have to secure things connected to the internet may or may not work. Protecting critical infrastructure in particular is a huge challenge, and a really important one as well. There is a dramatic increase in the sophistication of cyber threats from Russia and China, and our adversaries use cyber attacks as a national level resource to globally project power, much as they could with nuclear weapons. MITRE, because of our unique position between government industry can help be a really that bridge that help both sides work together to address the problem. Sitting in the middle, we can help do the research and development to bring these things together. We can do the prototyping, and we can help inform policy, and really bring end to end solutions together. And then as we project into the future and we think about all this exciting new technology, we need to make sure. that we're baking in all the security that we're building now for cell phones, but into our autonomous vehicles and our smart grid in the future.
Capabilities
Countermeasures for OT
Deterring and countering adversary aggression within OT domains through understanding of intent, emulating behaviors, and employing deception and other tools.
Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Domain Analysis
Building a more actionable intelligence picture for responding to, and preventing attacks by enhancing threat analysis, stakeholder interoperability, and data enrichment.
Critical Infrastructure Resiliency & Safety
Ensuring critical infrastructure operations can be done safely, securely, and reliably even in contested environments through assessment and testing methods that identify and prioritize cross-cutting gaps for remediation, research, and innovation.
Cyber Autonomy
Applying AI, machine learning, and automation technology to increase the autonomy of cyber systems and enabing them to dynamically adapt when under failure, stress, or cyberattack and continue to operate to perform their core mission functions.
Cyber Command and Control
Forging powerful cyber command and control capabilities that provide commanders with flexible deterrence and response options, manage battlespace complexity, and enable scalable integration of cyber and kinetic mission planning, execution, and assessment.
Cyber Modeling and Simulation
Developing cost-effective capabilities to simulate infrastructure and control systems, conduct cyberattack simulations, and explore mitigation strategies safely.
OT/ Internet of Things Device Security
Securing devices central to infrastructure processes through technical analysis, reverse engineering, software analysis, vulnerability analysis, forensic analysis, and malware analysis to create defensive tools.
OT Engineering and Response
Applying secure design principles throughout the development and operations of critical infrastructure, enabling active defense, and supporting effective cybersecurity response and recovery.
Weapons Systems and Defense Critical Infrastructure
Enabling weapon systems and the defense critical infrastructure to endure unique cybersecurity challenges, contested environments, long lifespans, technology obsolescence, and cyber threats.
Related Content
Resources
ATT&CK Evaluations
Evaluations follow a rigorous, transparent methodology, using a collaborative, threat-informed purple-teaming approach to evaluate solutions within the context of ATT&CK.
ATT&CK FOR ICS
A globally accessible knowledge base of adversary behaviors based on real-world observations of industrial control systems.
CALDERA FOR OT
A scalable, adversary emulation platform empowering critical infrastructure cyber practitioners to save time, money, and energy through automated security assessments.
EMB3D
A threat model that provides a cultivated knowledge base of cyber threats to embedded devices, offering a common understanding of these threats with security mechanisms to mitigate them.
Infrastructure Susceptibility Analysis
The Infrastructure Susceptibility Analysis (ISA) process is a focused analytic approach designed to identify the most likely attack paths and methods undertaken by an adversary to compromise, exploit, and attack a target. This approach builds on existing threat intelligence techniques, which are inherently reactive, to predict where future attacks are likely to manifest.
Critical Infrastructure Protection Innovation Center
Our center develops technologies, practices, and approaches to protect critical infrastructure from malicious cyber or non-kinetic attack or disruption.
Get in Touch
Are you an asset owner or operator with challenges that can be addressed with our resources? Are you a government entity facing critical infrastructure technical or policy hurdles? Are you a research institution interested in collaboration? We want to hear from you. Contact us at OT@MITRE.org