Cyber- Threat Assessment for the Air Traffic Management System: A Network Controls Approach

摘要

A network modeling paradigm is developed for assessing the impact of cyber threats and failures on traffic flows across the National Airspace System. Specifically, a layered model is envisioned with: 1) flow/queueing model for traffic, 2) stochastic automaton-based model for weather impact, and 3) a percolation model for disruption of information resources provided by the cyber system. The traffic and weather models, which were developed in previous work, are briefly reviewed and the probabilistic cyber- disruption model is introduced in detail. A linearization of the layered model is also constructed, and used to formulate the threat-assessment problem from a network-controls viewpoint. This formulation is used to develop a simple graph-theoretic algorithm for determining vulnerabilities of traffic flows to possible disruptions, and to compute overall vulnerability of the traffic network to cyber disruptions. These results are validated in a small-scale case study.