Importance of protections against intentional attacks

The paper presents a generalized model of damage caused to a complex multi-state series-parallel system by intentional attack. The model takes into account the separation and protection of system elements. Protection importance indices are suggested that can be used for tracing bottlenecks in defense strategy and in identifying the most important protections. An algorithm for evaluating these indices is presented that uses a universal generating function technique for obtaining the system performance distribution. Illustrative example is presented.