Security & Resilience Engineering
The aim of this working group is to develop methods and tools that enable the realisation of trustworthy, reliable and intelligent cyber-physical systems. To achieve this goal, approaches for an appropriate design methodology will be investigated and implemented. Ideas for the design of such systems are taken from nature. Diversity within a complex system increases its resilience to various threats. For example, mixed forests are much more resistant to pests and fires than monocultures. Ideas can also be derived for IT security. Plants communicate to get help against predators. This principle can be applied to the distribution of IT security measures in complex cyber-physical systems. A key aspect here is the development and evaluation of metrics that allow the degree of resilience and IT security achieved in the design phase to be determined as reliably as possible. A particular challenge is to find approaches that enable systems to adapt in the event of attacks or subsystem failures. To this end, approaches from the field of artificial intelligence are being investigated, which enable systems to observe and assess their current state and to adapt to changes. Such approaches will also be investigated and used to evaluate the different designs and their evolution.
The fact that CPSoS essentially consist of resource-constrained subsystems is an additional design challenge, since not all mechanisms, e.g. in the area of IT security, can be implemented on all systems. This means that mechanisms are needed to distribute them as optimally as possible. Currently, mixed-integer linear program (MILP) approaches in combination with artificial evolution approaches are being investigated.
To support the implementation of the systems, in addition to the development tools, a component library will be created to store suitable solutions. Some of these will be developed by the SRE working group, particularly for IT security measures, while others will be adopted and integrated from the IIoT and PC working groups or from other departments.
