The project has been financed by the European Commission's Critical Infrastructure Protection program and apart from the Port of Piraeus, the ports of Spain, Italy and Slovenia, as well as businesses and educational organizations from Spain, Great Britain and the countries of France, Austria and Belgium participate.

The University of Piraeus participates in the project with Scientific Organizer professor Christos Douligeris of the Informatics Department. For the successful outcome of the pilot, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Spyridon Papastergiou and PhD candidate Elma Kalogeraki worked closely with the Piraeus Port Authority (PAA).

In the European Union, ports play a vital role in facilitating foreign trade and passenger movement, playing a unique role in the global supply, travel and leisure chain. The EU-funded SAURON project aims to help port operators provide maximum security for workers, visitors, passengers and citizens living in the port area by combining the most advanced techniques related to prevention, detection and mitigation of threats.
The SAURON project aims to create a new platform for cyber situational awareness and physical security (SAA) to help port operators anticipate and respond to potential threats. The main objective of the project is to reduce the vulnerabilities of EU ports as one of the main European critical infrastructures and to increase their systemic resilience in the face of physical, or cyber or combined threats.
The operation of the SAURON platform was tested in the context of a terrorist attack scenario on a cruise ship docked in the port of Piraeus.