Benjamin Larsen: Trust Extensions in Next-Generation “System-of-Systems”
Cybersecurity is becoming an important topic due to the increasing recognition of its potential consequences, both directly to the systems concerned and indirectly to humans, society, and the environment at large. Digital economy, Cyber‐Physical Systems (CPS), cyberspace, and Internet of Things (IoT) connect Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and other digital entities to even larger Systems‐of‐Systems (SoS), making sound security design more and more challenging and isolation absolutely obsolete.
A key challenge given the high uncertainty and complexity of processes to formalize the factors affecting the final indices of system security is establishing and managing trust between entities, starting from bi‐lateral interaction between two single system components and continuing as such systems get connected to ever larger entities.
This raises the question: "How can we make sound statements on the security properties of single systems and transfer this to statements on the security properties of such hierarchical compositions of systems"?
Or in plain English: "How can we generate and propagate trust throughout a system"?
Therefore, a holistic, integrated approach with end‐to‐end capabilities covering device integrity and trust, security management of data, software and timely patching, and threat intelligence are necessary.
In this project, we research the design and development of cryptographically secure and scalable attestation mechanisms for enhancing the overall privacy posture of deployed fog devices and verifying the integrity of deployed software‐based services. Privacy cannot be neglected when attesting to the security-critical circumstances of a system.
We further research the vulnerability analysis of trusted computing technologies (i.e., DICE, PUFs) and the underlying TCG Software Stack (TSS), and the market landscapes in general, to provide appliable and accurate knowledge to support enhancement and development