The AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH is an Austrian research institute with a European format and focuses on the key infrastructure issues of the future. The AIT Safety & Security Department focuses on these two important aspects of ever-increasing relevance for today’s citizens, which will also take centre stage in the information society of tomorrow.
- “Safety” is in our case related to technologies and refers to the personal safety of individuals, which is directly or indirectly dependent on the proper functioning or availability of an information processing and/or autonomous system.
- “Security” rather refers to the protection of information and the prevention of any potential violation through unauthorized access to or alteration of personal information. Security may also refer to classical security techniques (surveillance) that are supported by IT.
The Department of Safety & Security is making a significant contribution to ICT and is devoting concerted efforts to guaranteeing operational efficiency and reliability of all critical infrastructures – both private and public – especially in times of potential ecological, economic and political crisis. We are committed to fostering the roll-out of national infrastructure as well as the deployment of state-of-the-art technologies in the area of public administration (eGovernment, eEnvironment), power grids, health care (eHealth), transportation networks, payment systems, telecommunications, Internet as well as the business and industrial sector with a view to positioning Austria at the forefront of the European ICT industry.
Competencies: As the largest non-university research facility in Austria, AIT has a long history and outstanding track record on participating and leading EU and national research projects. An important part of the research of the IT Security within the Safety & Security Department is concentrated on secure system design for safety and security-critical information systems. Our current research work includes security aspects in Cloud Computing, security technologies for Service Oriented Architecture with a focus on the efficient implementation of security requirements through model-driven approaches, the development of federated identity management, cyber defences of critical infrastructure, security for smart grid and smart meters, and organisational information security management. AIT is an active member of the European research community, and has participated and also coordinated numerous European research projects. Recent activities of the Safety & Security Department include participation in the FP7 PRECYSE, FP7 SUDPLAN and FP7 ASSETS projects and the coordination of the FP7 SECCRIT and FP7 TaToo projects, among many others.
Main tasks: As the project coordinator, AIT will be in charge of the administrative and technical management of the project. AIT will also participate in the RTD work packages and lead tasks on the definition of Hybrid Risk Metrics and standardisation and regulation activities. In addition, AIT will support the implementation of use cases in the demonstration and contribute to the dissemination, exploitation and impact of the project results, as well as the coordination with the (extended) Advisory Board.