Critical infrastructures have evolved over the past decades to become largely computerised and interconnected all over the world. This generated the problem of achieving resilience of Critical Information Infrastructures (CII) against computer-borne attacks and severe faults, similar to those observed in the internet. Governments and industry have been pushing an immense research effort in information and systems security, but we believe the complexity of the problem prevents it from being

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... d using classical security methods. This paper focuses on the computer systems behind electrical utility infrastructures. It proposes the blueprint of a distributed systems architecture that we believe may come to be useful as a reference for modern CII in general. The architecture is instantiated with a set of classes of techniques and algorithms, based on paradigms providing resilience to faults and attacks in an automatic way. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Veríssimo, P., Neves, N.F. and Correia, M. (2008) 'The CRUTIAL reference critical information infrastructure architecture: a blueprint', Int.