Master students at the Institute for Applied Computer Science (AINF) have the opportunity to do their project semester as part of a national or international research project.

Thomas Grafenauer is currently working within his project semester on CERBERUS, a FFG/KIRAS project dealing with the protection of critical infrastructure (KIs).

Based on the information on critical infrastructure objects collected by the public agencies, the security relevant data is structurally prepared and imported in a developed data model in the course of the CERBERUS project. This enables to logically represent the interdependencies and cascading effects in an interdependency model. This interdependency model can be used to identify, evaluate and simulate possible cascade effects. The simulation is done in “Omnet++”, an event simulation tool. With the help of the simulation, the effects of the cascade effect are made visible, enabling targeted preventive measures to be taken at the most critical points of the network.