Vital Area Identification – State-of-the-Art
Keywords:
Target identification, vital area identification, physical protection system, fault tree, event tree, attack tree, protection treeAbstract
When it comes to designing the effective physical protection of a critical infrastructure against malicious attacks, the knowledge of potential targets of the attack or areas in which these targets are placed is the basic presumption. Without knowing the attack targets it is impossible to plan sensibly the physical protection system or evaluate its effectiveness. That is the reason why a great deal of interest is paid to the identification of targets or vital areas, and a number of methods and procedures which might be used for the targets identification have been developed. The article brings the results of the extensive analysis of the current state in this area. It includes a brief historical development of the processes of attack targets identification and introduces methods and approaches used within these procedures. Admittedly the attention is paid mainly to the identification of vital areas at nuclear facilities, but the performed analysis did not address only this area of highest attention, but also the systematically examined current state of a critical infrastructure in general.
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