Methods, tools and trainings for safe and secure smart systems

Interconnected embedded systems integrated into the physical surroundings are known as cyber physical systems (CPS). They are the driving force behind many technological innovations designed to improve efficiency, functionality, and the reliability of products, services and infrastructures. In turn, our society is becoming dependent on these ‘intelligent‘ or ‘smart’ systems: they are used in everything from smart home appliances to industrial controls, smart cities, and intelligent transport.

Owing to the scale, complexity, and connectivity of these systems, ensuring their safety, security, and resilience is a very challenging task. Faults and malfunctions as well as malicious attacks can cripple a system and lead to devastating consequences in the physical world, eliminating all the advantages technology brings. Since system features increasingly depend on computation, network, and information processing, safety and security become tightly coupled in CPS - modern systems are largely interconnected: today, safety cannot be guaranteed without taking security into account, and security measures can be influenced by safety requirements.

An integrated process for cyber security and safety has the advantage of a common resource set, thus requiring fewer additional resources. The Austrian research centre AIT Austrian Institute of Technology is actively involved in standardisation activities to foster safety and security co-engineering and to promote joint approaches: The Dependable Systems Engineering group at AIT has a long-standing history in addressing the interdependencies of safety, security and reliability. Besides conducting leading research, the group is developing new methods and tools to guarantee safety and security of systems. It also makes its accumulated experience and expertise available through trainings and consulting.

Dependability means availability, reliability, safety, integrity, maintainability, and security. It is a key aspect in many application domains. For instance, robots are increasingly expected to be working together with humans in the Industry 4.0 setting. Self-driving cars will take autonomous decisions based on sensor data and communication with other vehicles and infrastructure. Strongly interconnected Internet of Things-services and devices also are expected to work reliably, and be safe and secure at the same time. In domains like these, safety, security and privacy overlap and any malfunction or weakness can result in loss of human lives or expensive damage and loss of reputation. Ensuring the dependability of these complex systems therefore is a precondition for the public to be trusting and accepting them.

• safety & security co-engineering
• modelling of cyber-threats
• automated test case generation
• runtime verification
• machine code analysis
• trainings & consulting