We increasingly trust our own, as well as the environments well-being to electronic systems. Be it while flying in a plane, working in an automated factory or driving a smart car.
All those systems are equipped with many sensors and actuators which need to communicate with each other. This communication is critical to the function of the whole system. Imagine that in a smart car the message from the brake-pedal does not reach the brakes, or does not reach them in time.
We differentiate two aspects that try to assure the correct function of such a system: Safety and Security. Safety concerns the protection from unintended faults: cables breaking, influence from radiation etc. Security however is the protection from deliberate attacks by “hackers”.
A lot of research focuses on either aspect while neglecting the other. I want to propose methods for the design of these critical systems that integrate both, because either property is meaningless without the other!
In more technical terms I am looking into things like: Time-Sensitve Networking and Scheduling Algorithms, Authentication Protocols and Security-aware Modeling.