CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Alexander Y Thymmons |
|---|---|
| Title | The Regional Securitization of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems |
| Summary | Energy production, transportation and distribution rely today on smart technologies that are vulnerable to various threats in the cyber domain. This research defines cyber domain as the totality of interconnected systems used for the purpose of enabling communication between physical (hardware), logical (software) and/or social (digital persona) layers by electronic means. Almost all critical energy technologies (even most of the stand-alone systems) are connected to the cyber domain; making every critical energy infrastructure vulnerable to malicious cyber activities. When critical energy infrastructure fails (due to technical or human factors), environmental disasters happen: oil spills (like the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska and British Petroleum Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico), black-outs (like the Northeast or Italy blackouts of 2003), and even nuclear meltdowns (like the Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan). A cyber-attack against an oil tanker’s navigation systems could cause the next oil spill; a SCADA attack could cause the next major blackout (this has already happened in Ukraine); and a malicious code against nuclear centrifuges (like we have seen in the case of Stuxnet) could cause the next nuclear meltdown. The cyber threats to critical energy infrastructure are growing exponentially and nation states can no longer defend themselves without the support of strategic alliances in the cyber domain. In this context, regional collective security alliances, such as the North Atlantic Alliance, emerge as necessary instruments that complement national efforts in protection of domestic cyber-physical systems. For example, NATO Cyber Rapid Reaction teams are already placed at the disposal of NATO member states to assist in protection of domestic critical energy infrastructure, if the need ever arises. While this is the case, there are currently no studies addressing the cyber threats to regional energy systems and the role of collective security alliances in combating them. To address this gap in literature, this paper looks at the growing energy security role of NATO in the cyber domain to empirically validate the role of collective security alliances in the security of regional energy systems—geo-energy systems—and their prospects. It also proposes an explanatory framework—that considers the environmental effects of malicious cyber activities—for the role of collective security alliances in protecting critical cyber-physical energy systems. The main contributions to literature rest in 1) addressing the cyber threats to critical energy infrastructure within the context of regional rather than traditional global and national lens; 2) validating the feasibility of collective security alliances to integrate the protection of national cyber-physical energy systems into their mandate (the ends); and 3) recognizing the link between cyber threats and environmental considerations. |
| Supervisor | Antypas, Alexios |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/iftimie_ion.pdf |
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