The goal of WSAN4CIP is to substantially advance the technology of Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) beyond the current state of the art and to apply this technology to the Protection of Critical Infrastructures. In particular, the WSAN4CIP project will apply these advanced wireless and sensor network developments to the management of power generation and distribution infrastructure management systems, which is one of the most demanding applications for wireless infrastructure, to demonstrate the appropriateness and effectiveness of the WSAN4CIP project results.The project will contribute to making networked information and process control systems much more secure and resilient. The highly distributed nature of Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) boosts their ability to survive malicious attacks as well as accidental and operational failures. It makes them dependable in critical situations, when information is needed to prevent further damage to Critical Infrastructures (CIs). As WSANs are inexpensive to deploy and self-organizing it is both practical and efficient to consider an emergency extension of the WSAN as a first reaction to CI problems. The WSAN4CIP project will show how exploiting these features make WSAN an ideal mechanism to improve situation awareness of managing tools for critical infrastructures.A main challenge of the WSAN4CIP project is that the current state-of-the-art technology for WSANs is not sufficiently dependable for CI use. The WSAN4CIP project will: * Design new sensor node protection mechanisms to improve their dependability * Develop innovative dependable networking approaches for WSANs * Create dependable services to run on top of WSANs that ensure a controlled degradation of information in case of failures rather than total management system failure.The project will also develop design methodologies, and define an open interface to ensure interoperability with existing CI management applications.