Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources

Overview

Protecting and ensuring the continuity of the critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR) of the United States are essential to the nation's security, public health and safety, economic vitality, and way of life.

  • Critical Infrastructure are the assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, public health or safety, or any combination thereof.
  • Key Resources are publicly or privately controlled resources essential to the minimal operations of the economy and government.

Attacks on CIKR could significantly disrupt the functioning of government and business alike and produce cascading effects far beyond the targeted sector and physical location of the incident. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7 (HSPD-7) established U.S. policy for enhancing CIKR protection by establishing a framework for partners to identify, prioritize, and protect the nation's CIKR from terrorist attacks.

The directive identified CIKR sectors and designated a Federal Sector-Specific Agency (SSA) to lead CIKR protection efforts in each.

National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP)

The National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) provides the unifying structure for the integration of a wide range of efforts for the enhanced protection and resiliency of the nation's CIKR into a single national program.

CIKR Sectors

  • Agriculture and Food.
  • Banking and Finance.
  • Chemical.
  • Commercial Facilities.
  • Communications.
  • Critical Manufacturing.
  • Dams.
  • Defense Industrial Base.
  • Emergency Services.
  • Energy.
  • Government Facilities.
  • Healthcare and Public Health.
  • Information Technology.
  • National Monuments and Icons.
  • Nuclear Reactors, Materials and Waste.
  • Postal and Shipping.
  • Transportation Systems.
  • Water.

Additional Information