The protection of critical infrastructures, such as electrical power
grids, has become a primary concern of many nation states in recent
years. Critical infrastructures involve multi-dimensional, highly
complex collections of technologies, processes, and people, and as
such, are vulnerable to potentially catastrophic failures on many
levels. Moreover, cross-infrastructure dependencies can give rise to
cascading and escalating failures across multiple infrastructures. In
order to address the problem of critical infrastructure protection,
our research is developing innovative approaches to modeling critical
infrastructures, with emphasis on analyzing the ramifications of
cross-infrastructure dependencies. This paper presents an initial
overview of the research and of the modeling environment under
development.