A Multi-agent Immunologically-inspired Model for Critical Information Infrastructure Protection -- An Immunologically-inspired Conceptual Model for Security on the Power Grid

Critical Infrastructure (CI) is the term used to describe assets that are of utmost importance, or in other words, essential in the functioning of an environment. Societies depend on their critical infrastructure in order to maintain and continuously improve on their standards of living. As these systems increasingly depend on cyber-technology, their security on networked environments become crucial. The modern smart grid has become part of CI through the enhancement it provides to regular electricity grid infrastructure. The application of biologically inspired systems to ensure security in aspects such as intrusion detection, access control, anomaly detection and others has become a widely researched field in when dealing with networked computing systems. This paper discusses the importance of CI, the application of artificial immune systems in the protection of CI information systems and proposes a new model for smart grid protection using biologically inspired concepts.