Computer Safety and Security Assessment – Methods and Practice

Dear Colleagues,

Modern society is highly dependent on computer-based systems. From financial transactions to power distribution, most, if not all, basic and consumer services are now controlled by software and computers, and this dependency will tend to increase in the future. Such a scenario poses an immediate question about safety and security: How secure are our personal data, and how safe is society at large when so many essential aspects are dependent on the correct behaviour of software in computers? Computer-based systems can exhibit incorrect behaviour in several situations: Requirements may have been wrong, there may be faults in the software, and the system may be attacked by a malicious third party. In the eminence of any of these cases, users and system integrators need to have the means to assess the security that a system exhibits, in order to decide what preventive measures should be taken or if the system should be used at all. Thus, security evaluation is a relevant research topic.

Security evaluation is a hard topic due to the many factors involved, especially when considering the many unknown factors that are related to the root causes of the lack of security (e.g., hidden vulnerabilities, unknown forms of attack, etc.), the lack of standardized methods, and the lack of tools. Experimental methodologies play a key role in this area and tools are methodologies are needed. Many research works exist on this topic, and many more are still needed given the relevance and difficulty of this topic.

Prof. Dr. Joao Duraes
Guest Editor

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• security 
• safety 
• experimental evaluation 
• computer systems