The 4th CRIS conference follows a series of successful international conferences on the theme of critical infrastructures (Bejing 2002, Grenoble 2004, Virginia 2006) in which actors from several communities come together to discuss the latest studies of vulnerabilities, research challenges, and results within the area of critical infrastructures. Presentation of state-of-the-art research is combined with discussion forums in which a range of stakeholders from the industry and government organisations to vendors and technology providers exchange their latest findings.

Being an international network with participants in Europe, Americas and Asia, the ambition of the forthcoming CRIS conference will be to provide a natural forum to bring together speakers from different continents in both power networks and information infrastructures, including computer and communication networks. Other critical infrastructures, such as water management systems, transport systems, banking and finance, as well as networks for defence and security are of course highly dependent on the above networks and novel analyses of their interdependencies are highly recommended. The goal is to provide a networking occasion for local cooperation as well as international exchange.

SYNOPSIS:

The special theme of the 2009 conference is:

“Critical infrastructures: Migration from existing technologies to future platforms”

The theme reflects the fact that there is a major technology shift in the 21^st century with an unprecedented pace affecting all major infrastructures on which the society depends. Energy and climate concerns have brought about a wide range of new technologies for energy generation and distribution with associated decentralised regimes. Progress in microelectronics has made wireless networking a basic tenet of everyday life, and enables mobile networking with no fixed infrastructure a possibility in future scenarios. Spontaneous networks are already being promoted as a potential in disaster relief scenarios.

At the same time, the vulnerabilities and threats to the existing (traditional) infrastructures follows an exponential development, both due to wider deployment of software-intensive components and global political-economic factors that make automated and sophisticated attacks much more widespread than a decade ago.

We specifically encourage contributions that address the migration path between the old and the new; specifically, the sound and healthy transition from a protection strategy that is built around the notion of defence-in-depth, to the novel ideas of self-organising and self-managing networks with built-in resilience; or a realistic transition from a centralised power system control to open, autonomic, decentralised control architecture.

The conference will (non-exclusively) address the following research areas:

• Dependability/resilience of IP network infrastructure
• Interaction between IP network resilience and other critical infrastructures
• Inherently resilient infrastructures and their scalability
• Quality of service assurance: migration to emerging infrastructures
• Monitoring and mitigation of threats: reusable components
• Socio-economic factors affecting the migration to new technologies
• Management of risk in migration to emerging infrastructures
• Resilience to failures and attacks: migration strategies
• Information network management, monitoring and configuration
• Power trading and its impact on resilience of the network
• From brittle to ductile power networks
• Wide Area Measurement System Applications
• Studies related to recent protocols (e.g. IEC 61850 in power)
• Power System Monitoring, Protection, and Control
• Distributed power generation and infrastructure change
• The changing role of energy end users
• Open information architecture for critical infrastructures
• Quantitative evaluation of infrastructure interdependencies
• Information infrastructures for disaster management

SUBMISSIONS:

Manuscripts that describe original unpublished work (not submitted elsewhere) in the above and related areas are solicited for post conference publications in a proceedings that will appear in IEEE explore (approval pending). The papers should be submitted in electronic form, pdf format, and have a maximum length of 8 pages in standard IEEE format. Selected papers will be published in the international journal of critical infrastructure protection (Elsevier publishers) as a fast track submission.

Important dates:

• Deadline for submission: 7 January 2009 14 January 2009
  
• Notification of acceptance/rejection: 15th February
  
• Final manuscript deadline: 15 March 2009
  
• Work-in-progress papers: 15 March 2009

Conference chairs:

• Simin Nadjm-Tehrani (Linköping university, Sweden)
• Virgilio Centeno (Virginia Tech., USA)

Local organisation chair:

• Mikael Asplund (Linköping university, Sweden)

Program committee:

• Michael Behringer (Cisco, France)
• Sandro Bologna (ENEA, Italy)
• François Bouffard (University of Manchester, UK)
• Markus Brändle (ABB, Switzerland)
• Chi-yung Chung (Hong Kong Poly. Univ., China)
• Geert Deconinck (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)
• Chris deMarco (University of Wisconsin, USA)
• Giovanna Dondossola (CESI ricerca SpA, Italy)
• Zhao Yang Dong (University of Queensland, Australia)
• Nouredine Hadjsaid (INPG Grenoble, France)
• Chris Johnsson (University of Glasgow, UK)
• Erland Jonsson (Chalmers, Sweden)
• Frank Kargl (Ulm University, Germany)
• Daniel Karlsson (Gothia Power, Sweden)
• Himanshu Khurana (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Engin Kirda (Eurecom, France)
• Javier Lopez-Muñoz (University of Malaga, Spain)
• Zofia Lukszo (TU Delft, The Netherlands)
• Klara Nahrstedt (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Arun Phadke (Virginia Tech., USA)
• Ludovic Pietre-Cambacedes (Telecom ParisTech, France)
• Nahid Shahmehri (Linköping university, Sweden)
• Pascal Sitbon (EDF, France)
• Arun Somani (Iowa State Univ., USA)
• Hugo Straumann (Swisscom, Switzerland)
• Mats Söderström (Linköping university, Sweden)
• Stephen D. Wolthusen (University of London, UK)
• Felix Wu (University of Hongkong, China)