Software Engineering Institute

The banking and finance infrastructure is one of the most critical infrastructures in the country. This infrastructure is crucial to the country in terms of economic development, confidence of residents, and the ability to support the growth of the nation. To preserve the public's confidence in this infrastructure, we need to examine its survivability. Survivability is the ability of a system to fulfill its mission, in a timely manner, in the presence of attacks, accidents, and failures. One approach to investigating the survivability of the banking and finance system is to design a simulation for the infrastructure. The simulation can help people to better understand the infrastructure by being able to run scenarios of simulated cyber-attacks against the infrastructure and to view the results.

We discussed several ways for analyzing survivability, including simulation tools. Then we introduce the tools we chose, EASEL (the Emergent Algorithms Simulation Environment and Language), and the concept of EMergent Algorithms. From the perspective of simulation, we study three payment systems in the infrastructure and present the result as the list of actors, neighbors, functions, and the algorithms which actors perform. Then we illustrate the interdependencies we found among the three payment systems.

After we understand the three payment systems, and illustrate the interdependencies among them, we discuss the relationships between the interdependencies and the survivability requirements for the infrastructures. We will also discuss some advantages and disadvantages about using EASEL to design the simulation and describe the payment systems.