Advanced trust negotiation in critical infrastructures

The modern critical infrastructures (Power grids, Power plants, gas and oil pipelines etc.) are nowadays strongly interconnected at national and international level. The failure of one of them can originate cascading effects which might have serious and disastrous impact on others, even geographically far, infrastructures. The exchange of information about vulnerabilities, threats, countermeasures among the different actors of such interleaved systems assumes a not negligible role in the prevention of continental disasters. Due to their intrinsic nature, such information has to be considered strongly confidential and sensitive. Cope with the two needs of ¿share information¿ preserving the ¿confidentiality¿ according to some criteria, is the big obstacle in the creation of effective critical infrastructure information sharing networks. In this paper we present an extension of the well known Trust-X negotiation framework, which allows to address the confidentiality problem in the context of information sharing for critical infrastructures.