Critical Infrastructure Resilience

Abstract

Sovereignty controls are only as credible as the last time they were actually tested under stress. This paper proposes a threat modeling and resilience testing methodology specifically for sovereign digital infrastructure, distinct from conventional disaster-recovery planning because its central failure scenario is not a natural disaster or hardware fault but the withdrawal of cooperation by a foreign vendor, partner state, or standards body. It traces the history of resilience engineering, introduces a threat taxonomy covering supply interruption, legal compulsion, and coordinated coercion, and specifies a red-team exercise template — the “sovereignty drill” — that operationalizes the Level 4 maturity criterion introduced in SDIS-01. It examines fourteen detailed case studies of drills that succeeded, failed, or revealed unexpected dependencies, and closes with economic and organizational considerations, an implementation roadmap, a glossary, and a self-assessment checklist.