Secure Mediation Gateway architecture enabling the communication among Critical Infrastructures

Representing one of the most technological dependencies of contemporary societies, Critical Infrastructures (CIs) have to ensure the highest security levels to be able of fulfill their duty in any circumstances. This is the main goal of MICIE (Tool for systemic risk analysis and secure mediation of data exchanged across linked CI information infrastructures) FP7 ICT-SEC project: the design and implementation of a real-time CI risk level prediction and alerting system [1]. In order to reach this objective, one of the main key challenge to be addressed is the design and the implementation of a Secure Mediation Gateway (SMGW), namely a new innovative network element able to: (i) discover CI status information, (ii) overcome information heterogeneity and (iii) provide a secure communication of such information among peer CIs. All the information discovered and collected by the SMGW are then provided to a dedicated prediction tool which is in charge of calculating a risk prediction for the CIs. This paper presents the functional architecture of the SMGW designed within the MICIE project, putting in evidence how it is possible to discover information and exchange critical information over a insecure network like Internet.