Gerald G. Brown, Distinguished Professor of Operations Research, Naval Postgraduate School , Monterey , California
Title: Identifying Vulnerabilities in Critical Infrastructure
With W. Matthew Carlyle, Javier Salmeron, R. Kevin Wood
Operations
Research Department , Naval Postgraduate School,
Monterey , California
We present case studies with surprising insights gained from employing classical military operations research to identifying vulnerabilities in, and protecting, civilian infrastructure. We assign small (1-to-4 person) teams of our military-officer graduate students to use public sources to plan attacks on critical infrastructure, and to plan defenses against these attacks. The rules we impose are simple:
“you must use public sources; you must not use your military identification, stationery, acquaintances, or affiliation to gain access to any privileged information; and you must be prepared to play the role of attacker or defender, based on a coin flip.”
This means each team must plan the actions of both the attacker and the defender, and assumes that each side in the conflict will anticipate what the other is preparing to do. These analyses therefore provide the best defense against the worst-case attacks mounted by a malicious, coordinated adversary. Our selection of case studies highlights “take-aways” from this research --- transcendent lessons we have learned that you should know and can apply.