European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Integrating Safety and Cybersecurity through Stochastic Model Checking

Project description

Integral framework to protect from safety and security risks

Advances in technology are making artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars and the internet of things a reality. Destined to make our world more connected, the challenge is to maintain high levels of safety from failures and malfunctions, and increased security to protect from malicious attacks. The EU-funded CAESAR project will develop a framework to address the main challenges. These include the association between safety and security (mapping how vulnerabilities and failures can propagate through a system and lead to disruptions). The CAESAR project will develop algorithms to efficiently compute system-level risk metrics, as well as risk quantification methods. The results will advance safety-security analyses and assist decision-making.

Objective

Emerging technologies, like self-driving cars, drones, and the Internet-of-Things must not impose threats to people, neither due to accidental failures (safety), nor due to malicious attacks (security). As historically separated fields, safety and security are often analyzed in isolation. They are, however, heavily intertwined: measures that increase safety often decrease security and vice versa. Also, security vulnerabilities often cause safety hazards, e.g. in autonomous cars. Therefore, for effective decision-making, safety and security must be considered in combination.

The CAESAR project will develop an effective framework for the joint analysis of safety and security risks.
The successful integration of safety and security faces three challenges:
1. The complex interaction between safety and security, mapping how vulnerabilities and failures propagate through a system and lead to disruptions.
2. The lack of efficient algorithms to compute system-level risk metrics, such as the likelihood and expected damage of disruptions. Such metrics are pivotal to prioritize risks and mitigate them via appropriate countermeasures.
3. The lack of proper risk quantification methods. Numbers are crucial to devise cost-effective countermeasures. Yet, objective numbers on safety and (especially) security risks are notoriously hard to obtain.
The CAESAR project will address these challenges by novel combinations of mathematical game theory, stochastic model checking and the Bayesian, fuzzy, and Dempster-Schafer frameworks for uncertainty reasoning.
Key outcomes:
• An effective framework for joint safety-security analysis
• Scalable algorithms and diagnosis methods to compute safety-security risk metrics
• Stochastic model checking in the presence of uncertainty
CAESAR will not only yield breakthroughs in safety-security analysis, but also for quantitative analyses in other domains. It will make decision making on safety-security easier, more systematic, and transparent.

Host institution

UNIVERSITEIT TWENTE
Net EU contribution
€ 2 000 000,00
Address
DRIENERLOLAAN 5
7522 NB Enschede
Netherlands

See on map

Region
Oost-Nederland Overijssel Twente
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 2 000 000,00

Beneficiaries (1)