With the increasing digitization of processes and infrastructures, the risk of potential cyber-attacks is also increasing. Critical infrastructures are an attractive target for digital attacks due to their complexity, but also due to their importance for the functioning of the economy and society as well as for national security. The AEROKI project aims to develop efficient, applicable methods and tools for these complex structures, which enable an assessment of the current security situation at any time under constantly changing threat scenarios.

Airports can be seen as a collection of critical infrastructure and have different types of it. Combinations of logistics systems with energy networks, health systems and air surveillance systems form a multi-layered critical infrastructure that is complex to manage, and which represents an attractive target for attacks due to its economic and logistical relevance. The AEROKI project is based on the critical infrastructure of Frankfurt Airport, which is the largest airport in Germany and one of the busiest hubs in Europe.

The AEROKI project is a collaboration between the Fraport AG, the Fraunhofer Institute for Labor Economics and Organisation, the Institute for Labor Science and Technology Management at the University of Stuttgart and the Department of Business Informatics and Information Management at the University of Frankfurt. As part of the project, the University of Frankfurt will develop a method for situational threat analysis of critical infrastructures. For this purpose, semi-structured data are collected automatically by using a scraping mechanism. The collected data form the basis of cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. The aim of the analyzes is to identify specific attack patterns of cyber-attacks on critical infrastructures and to uncover complex, non-linear relationships between anomalies and various cyber-attacks. The findings should help to decode the complexity of cyber-attacks and to assess the threat situation. The development of a suitable procedure for situational threat analysis should be included as part of the risk value scoring of the overall project.