Critical Aviation Information Systems: Identification and Protection

Introduction

Present-day trends in information and communication technologies (ICT) have caused phenomenal dependence the society form services which different infrastructure proposed. For now, quality and accessibility of these services are the main points of infrastructure development of the state. According to that, the ensuring their protection and stability are the most essential and mandatory part of State security in developed countries. Increased concentration of facilities and resources for protection the different types of electronic infrastructure had necessitated ranking of infrastructure objects, choosing the most important of them and creating the “critical infrastructure” (CI) definition. Typically, this category relates to energy and transmission line, oil and gas line, seaports, high-speed and government communications channels, life-saving systems of megacities, high-tech enterprises and enterprises of the military-industrial complex, and also the central government authority. The civil aviation (CA), given the need to ensure sustained communication and cooperation between ground-based and aircraft systems, are required special attention. Therefore, identifying the objects which are critical for ensuring the system information continuing operation is the first priority. Nevertheless, an unlimited number of objects and system parameters that constantly varied and unforeseen behavior of objects with lots of interlinkages are the main reason for difficulties with the identified objects of state critical infrastructure. The basic component of critical infrastructure is an informational part – so-called CII (critical information infrastructure). The main reasons for the CII importance are the widespread usage in all areas of human activity of ICT, dependence on them of citizens, society and the state, as well as increasing vulnerabilities and potential threats of different nature. Moreover, in some countries a strong focus on the CI importance for the nation (even the CII definition is critical national information infrastructure). In case of Ukraine, the legislative framework for regulating the protection of CI still in an early development stage, particularly, continuing the process of identifying the objects of state CI in different fields (with no great success, unfortunately). The problematic of CII protection (CIIP) in various fields was exploring by the Ukrainian and foreign scientists such as: H. Alcaraz, D. Biryukov, D. Bobro, D. Gritsalis, O. Dovgan, E. Yeliseyev, A. Kondratiev, M. Merabti, L. Romano, H. Sitarlis, I. Fovino, V. Kharchenko and others. However, the most of researches are not systemic: 1) mostly researches oriented on development and implement preventive and countermeasures for protection particular CI or CII objects; 2) not enough focus making on the mechanism of formulating the list of state CІІ, and known approaches (according to the international standards and recommended practices), which are not formalized that make it difficult to use them on the state level, especially in CA. According to that, a development the unified data model and the methods of identifying the objects of CII is the actual scientific task that has theoretical and practical values.