Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) covers the policies, regulations, and technical measures that governments and operators use to safeguard assets whose disruption would cause significant harm to national security, the economy, public health, or safety. Typical sectors include energy, water, transportation, finance, healthcare, telecommunications, and increasingly digital services and data centers.
The concept gained prominence in the United States with Presidential Decision Directive 63 (PDD-63, 1998) under the Clinton administration, which first formally identified critical infrastructure sectors. It was expanded by the USA PATRIOT Act (2001) and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7 (HSPD-7, 2003), and later updated by Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21, 2013), which designated 16 critical infrastructure sectors coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security and, since 2018, by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
In the European Union, CIP is governed by the Critical Entities Resilience Directive (CER, Directive (EU) 2022/2557) and the NIS2 Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2555), both adopted in December 2022, which replaced the earlier 2008 European Critical Infrastructure Directive and the original 2016 NIS Directive. These instruments require member states to identify essential and important entities, conduct risk assessments, and impose cybersecurity and incident-reporting obligations.
CIP work generally combines:
- Physical security (perimeter controls, redundancy, hardening)
- Cybersecurity (network segmentation, OT/ICS protection, vulnerability disclosure)
- Information sharing through bodies such as ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers)
- Public-private partnership, since most infrastructure in market economies is privately owned
In the electricity sector specifically, CIP is also the short name for the NERC CIP standards, a set of mandatory reliability standards (CIP-002 through CIP-014) enforced by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation for the bulk electric system.
The 2015 and 2016 cyberattacks on Ukraine's power grid, the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident, and repeated attacks on water utilities have reinforced CIP as a central pillar of contemporary national security policy.
Example
After the May 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, CISA and the TSA issued new CIP-focused pipeline security directives requiring mandatory incident reporting by US pipeline operators.