Due to the increasing demand in services' quality and the growing concerns about external threats, the protection of critical infrastructures has recently become a major concern. In this article, we study the potential effect of interdependencies that may occur between two of these infrastructures: the telecommunication networks and the electrical network. In the absence of side protection mechanisms such as multihoming or batteries, these types of networks highly depend on each other. A

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... of some component in one of these architectures may cause a fault in the other, for example, when an electrical outage occurs, routers may be switched off as soon as their battery has depleted. This can lead to cross-domain cascading effects in failures propagation that cause general service unavailabilty. To understand this phenomena, we propose a model that describes the behaviour of these interdependent systems. We show on realistic topologies that simple failures can lead to failures propagation and we derive the potential risk scenarios. High-level modelling of critical infrastructures' interdependencies 101 been part of the department since 2005, teaching and performing research in networking. His research interests include understanding and proposing solutions for the security of critical infrastructures. He has been part of the Integrated Risk Reduction of Information-based Infrastructure Systems (IRRIIS) project (ICT-FP6 trust and security programme) since 2006, which aims to characterise and solve the interdependencies problems that may arise between telecommunication and power networks.