Projects - Stoelinga's ERC funded project CAESAR on integrating safety & cybersecurity has started

15 Jun 2020

Marielle Stoelinga’s project CAESAR in integrating safety & cybersecurity through stochastic model checking has started. The project is funded by an an ERC consolidator grant.

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.

The goal of the CAESAR project is will develop an effective framework for the joint analysis of safety and security risks. In particular, the project will work on three important challenges than hindered successful integration thus far:

1. The complex interaction between safety and security, mapping how vulnerabilities and failures propagate through a system and lead to disruptions
2. 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 countermeasure
3. 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.