Cyber and Infrastructure Resilience

The Cyber and Infrastructure Resilience Program's mission is to enhance the security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure systems and networks to cyber, physical, and environmental hazards and to enable their reliable and sustainable design and operation now and into the future. The program currently focuses primarily on the lifeline infrastructure sectors— energy, water, transportation, and communications— but also is concerned with the chemical, commercial, manufacturing, dam, defense, emergency, financial, agriculture, government, health care, information, and nuclear sectors. See Defending Critical Infrastructure from cyber, physical, and environmental challenges.

The Laboratory's cyber and infrastructure program includes the following:

Borders and Physical Security

Define, quantify, and develop methods to mitigate physical threats to infrastructure and border security through subject matter expert analysis and sophisticated modeling and simulation capabilities.

Civilian Cybersecurity

Provide capabilities to enhance the security and resilience of the nation's critical infrastructure systems and networks to cyber hazards, leveraging both LLNL's national security cyber program and our internal operational cybersecurity program.

Energy Infrastructure

Enable the secure, resilient, reliable, and sustainable design and operation of the nation's infrastructure systems now and into the future through the application of LLNL core strengths in systems engineering, high performance computing, and data analytics.

Water Security and Technology

Develop technologies and approaches to protect the nation’s water infrastructure and meet the increasing demand for clean water.

The Threat

Federal networks and agencies as well as critical infrastructure today are under constant cyber attack. Attacks on dams, power plants, power grids, and other critical infrastructure with intent to cause physical damage are on the rise. Attacks on the Ukraine’s power grid in 2015 and 2016 demonstrated that groups affiliated with nation states have the capability to cause power outages via cyber means. Such attacks could be much more detrimental to the U.S. because our "smart" power grid relies heavily on automated control.

“The threat of a catastrophic and damaging cyberattack in the United States critical infrastructure like our power or financial networks is actually becoming less hypothetical every day.” —Michael Rogers, former National Security Administration Director and Navy Admiral.