Connected Places Cyber Security Principles

You need to have a clear understanding of your connected place infrastructure by identifying, understanding, and assessing inter-dependencies. This needs to include:

• Knowing your architecture, including your users, your devices, and your connected place services to manage your boundaries appropriately. Our Zero trust architecture design principles may be useful here in considering how to better understand and manage a connected places system, due to the ever-changing boundaries often inherent within connected places.
• The types of data you (or others) hold as part of the city infrastructure, to help determine your most critical areas.
• The connections you have (and how they are connected). Do they have a strong user and device identity, and do they authenticate everywhere? 
• What products and protocols may be needed for your components to support continuous authentication, authorisation, and the protection of your data in transit (moving from one connected component to another)?
• Who and how users have access to the system with controls in place. You will need to understand what types of accesses your business requires as part of your connected place operations. You will also need to determine where policy enforcement points are needed, to grant and deny access for connections to your connected place.
• The resilience your system requires, and the impacts to your services in the event of performance degradation or failure.

The risk owners within your connected place will need to determine what impacts they are not willing to accept within their connected place system. Examples could include events such as technology faults or cyber attacks that may cause traffic lights to change, thereby increasing the risk of car crashes, or databases of sensitive data being openly available to the public. The risk owners of the connected place should:

• work out what is most important to the operability of their services (this could be the data your connected data stores or transfers, or the underlying architecture it relies upon)
• understand and make some assumptions about the threats they may face
• identify vulnerabilities and threats that could exploit them within your connected place (for example by using threat modelling)
• use analysis to create a list of risks that you can prioritise according to how concerning they are

Risk decision makers could break the impacts down into sections to simplify analysis and decision making, for example using confidentiality, integrity, and availability for data risks. Here is an example of how these criteria might inform decision making. Similar analysis should take place to identify risks around hardware, software, and configuration.