Enhancement of Critical Financial Infrastructure Protection Using Trust Management

Providing protection to the financial infrastructure in the face of faults and malevolent attacks is vital to the stability, availability, and continuity of key financial markets and businesses worldwide. Traditional protection approaches have focused on protecting individual financial institutions (FIs) while ignoring the threats arising from cross-domain interactions as well as those originating from other critical infrastructures. With the growing complexity of inter-organisational boundaries and their increasing interdependence, such isolated approaches are no longer adequate. However, sharing information between FIs relating to critical events and the reliance on others’ quality of service attributes such as security requires varying levels of trust between them depending on the requirements of each individual FI and the sensitivity of exchanged information. This paper describes a trust management system developed to allow the evaluation, monitoring, and management of trustworthiness levels of FIs exchanging critical events and information. Trustworthiness levels are used to assure FIs of the reliability of each other and to filter events and data being processed. The system introduces a novel reusable architecture that allows flexibility and extensibility of trust metrics and trust algorithms.