Model-Based Safety and Security Engineering

By exploiting the increasing surface attack of systems, cyber-attacks can cause catastrophic events, such as, remotely disable safety mechanisms. This means that in order to avoid hazards, safety and security need to be integrated, exchanging information, such as, key hazards/threats, risk evaluations, mechanisms used. This white paper describes some steps towards this integration by using models. We start by identifying some key technical challenges. Then we demonstrate how models, such as Goal Structured Notation (GSN) for safety and Attack Defense Trees (ADT) for security, can address these challenges. In particular, (1) we demonstrate how to extract in an automated fashion security relevant information from safety assessments by translating GSN-Models into ADTs; (2) We show how security results can impact the confidence of safety assessments; (3) We propose a collaborative development process where safety and security assessments are built by incrementally taking into account safety and security analysis; (4) We describe how to carry out trade-off analysis in an automated fashion, such as identifying when safety and security arguments contradict each other and how to solve such contradictions. We conclude pointing out that these are the first steps towards a wide range of techniques to support Safety and Security Engineering. As a white paper, we avoid being too technical, preferring to illustrate features by using examples and thus being more accessible.