As an assumption, our scope is currently focused
only on dependencies between TSPs and thus on
telecommunications service supply. We are aware
that, in the telecommunications sector, a large set of
risks also arises from dependencies with other kind of
providers, e.g. energy providers, digital service
providers, external staff, etc. However, considering
the priority established with the NRA, the other
dependencies are set aside for now and part of future
work.
BQ3 is also set aside in this paper. Expectations
and requirements still need to be further elaborated
and an iterative approach based on initial results
obtained for BQ1 and BQ2 would help to do so.
4 RELATED WORK
The importance of interdependencies between critical
infrastructures, including Cyber Interdependency, has
been highlighted for years (Rinaldi et al., 2001) and
to manage risks coming from these interdependencies
is our current research challenge. Therefore, we
surveyed systemic risk management related to
information systems and critical infrastructures.
Systemic risk management in the financial domain is
considered here as out of the scope, because based on
a completely different paradigm (purely quantitative,
mathematical and financial approaches) and a
specific background (finance and economy).
Moreover, a preliminary survey of systemic risk
management in the banking and finance domain has
shown that the research questions established in the
previous section are completely overlooked.
At the opposite of the banking and finance
domain, where the concept of systemic risk is highly
prominent, the literature on systemic risk in IT and
critical infrastructure is much less prominent (Bartle
& Laperrouza, 2009). We agree with Bartle and
Laperrouza when they state that systemic risk is only
referenced briefly in the literature and not subject to
extended and explicit analysis. It is clear today that
the domain of security risk management has been
extensively studied in the academic and industrial
world (Dubois et al., 2010; ENISA (European
Network and Information Security Agency), 2006),
but the current methods of risk assessment seem not
to be fully equipped to deal with the level of
complexity inherent to such systems (Zio, 2007) and
thus to address systemic risks.
As part of related work, Zimmerman and Restrepo
suggest to understand and quantify the cascading
effects of risks among interdependent infrastructure
systems (Zimmerman & Restrepo, 2006). The scope
of risk management is focused on the energy
infrastructure context and concerns the risk of power
outage. Cascading effect is measured by comparing
the duration of the electric power outage with the
duration of the infrastructure outage which is a
consequence of the electric power outage.
The introduction of systems thinking to risk
management is a promising way to address our
challenge especially since the literature on systems
thinking is prominent (White, 1995). A concrete
application of systems thinking to security risk
management has been done by Naudet et al. who
propose a meta-model integrating systemic aspects in
the domain of security risk management (Naudet et
al., 2016). An application of the meta-model was
done in the context of IT service providers of the
financial sector.
Ligaarden et al. developed an approach to monitor
risk in interconnected systems (Ligaarden et al.,
2015). More specifically, they propose a method for
the capture and monitoring of impact of service
dependencies on the quality of provided services. The
method is divided into four steps: documentation of
interconnected systems, analysis of the impact of
service dependencies on risk to quality of provided
services, establishment of indicators, and design and
deployment of identified indicators. The first step
about documentation of interconnected systems is
based on the notion of trust between the actors of the
network. The risk-based approach we want to design
is complementary with this approach, because it
could help to formalise and justify this trust level
between actors. The modelling language used is
CORAS (Lund et al., 2010). A key difference with
our context is that in this approach, the risk
assessment is performed by one single entity having
enough information to analyse the system of systems
as a whole. In our context, this approach is not
possible, because the infrastructure of each TSP is
confidential and known only by them. Our challenge
is focused on how to correlate risk assessments
established by different actors.
Very close to our concerns, Bernardini et al. have
developed a tool for a system approach to risk
management in mission critical systems (Bernardini
et al., 2013). The paper depicts the conceptual and
functional model of the tool and reports on its
application in the healthcare sector. However, no
information is given on our key research questions
such as how to model dependencies or how risks are
cascaded.
The Preliminary Interdependency Analysis (PIA)
is a tool-supported methodology for analysing
interdependencies between critical infrastructure