The Marriage Between Safety and Cybersecurity: Still Practicing

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.

This paper discusses three major challenges that a successful integration of safety and security faces: (1) The complex interaction between safety and security (2) The lack of efficient algorithms to compute system-level risk metrics (3) The lack of proper risk quantification methods. We will point out several research directions to tackle these challenges, exploiting novel combinations of mathematical game theory, stochastic model checking, as well as the Bayesian, fuzzy, and Dempster-Schafer frameworks for uncertainty reasoning. Finally, we report on early results in these directions.