Sovereign Digital Infrastructure Series (SDIS) — SDIS 07: Critical Infrastructure Resilience

SDIS-07 — Critical Infrastructure Resilience: Threat Models and Continuity Design for Sovereign Digital Systems

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.

The paper traces the history of resilience engineering as a discipline and why sovereignty-specific threats require an extension of it, 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, addresses eight common objections, and closes with economic and organizational considerations, an implementation roadmap, a glossary, and a self-assessment checklist.

Keywords: resilience, critical infrastructure, threat modeling, redundancy, kill-switch risk

This is Paper 7 of 12 in the Sovereign Digital Infrastructure Series (D-AI), operationalizing the maturity model from SDIS-01 and connecting to the sovereign cloud patterns in SDIS-02 and the compute-dependency threats in SDIS-05. A companion series guide (SDIS-00) provides a full cross-citation map, publication registry, and licensing terms for all papers.

Series: Sovereign Digital Infrastructure Series (SDIS) · Publication: SDIS-07 · Author: Bijan Burnard · Affiliation: D-AI Research · Version: 1.0 · Publication Date: 23 August 2026 · ISBN: 978-969-9597-35-0 · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22085456 · License: CC BY 4.0