Secure Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures (CI) provide societies with essential goods and services. With the growing impact of digitalisation, information and communication technologies play an increasing role within these entities. Large-scale outages in many of the ten German CI sectors revealed the increasing vulnerabilities stemming from dependencies on electricity and connectivity. While the CI concept is widely used in current public debates, some inconsistencies require nuanced attention from students and researchers of CI. This chapter introduces secure critical infrastructures. It therefore provides an overview of the central characteristics, essential concepts of hierarchy, (inter-)dependency, criticality, and vulnerability to enable a coherent analysis of CI. To map out the multi-actor landscape within CI, the private, public, hybrid and civil-society stakeholders mainly shaping CI policies and discourses will be introduced.