Category: Security and Privacy

  • Andrew Odlyzko on Cybersecurity not Being a Big Deal

    1. In 2019, Andrew Odlyzko published a paper in ACM Ubiquity in which he argued that cybersecurity was not as big a deal as some prognosticators had claimed http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/cyberinsecurity.pdf There are a number of insights, as well as some questionable arguments. I find it worth commenting. Paragraphs are numbered. I abbreviate the author’s name to AO.…

  • System Safety, Cybersecurity, the “Scope” of IEC 61508 and Broken Standards

    IEC 61508, the the international standard for functional safety of systems involving E/E/PE subsystems (which nowadays means mostly every engineered system), is being revised, or “maintained” in the IEC jargon. It started, for the SW part, in November 2014 and for the general-systems and HW part in November 2017, after a request for comments from…

  • Passwords and Requirements Engineering

    Readers may know that for quite some time I have been working on topics in requirements engineering, in particular for safety requirements. They may recall previous posts here at https://abnormaldistribution.org/index.php/2010/11/09/formal-definition-of-the-notion-of-safety-requirement/ and https://abnormaldistribution.org/index.php/2010/11/09/the-parable-of-the-exploding-apples/ as well as the terminology engineering in OPRA at https://rvs-bi.de/publications/books/RVS-Bk-17-02/Ch03-OPRA.pdf and the derivation of demonstrably-relatively-complete safety requirements in Bernd Sieker’s doctoral thesis (in German) https://rvs-bi.de/publications/Theses/Dissertation_Bernd_Sieker.pdf Unfortunately, requirements analysis and engineering…

  • “Security Risk” and Probability

    In the last little while I have repeatedly encountered people in safety&security standardisation circles who are trying to equate IEC 61508 SILs (Safety Integrity Levels) with IEC 62443 SLs (Security Levels). I saw another instance yesterday, in a paper written for AMAA 2015 by someone actively involved in international safety+security standardisation. A SIL is a pure reliability…

  • Yet Another KRACK

    Matthew Green’s blog post on the KRACK vulnerability, entitled “Falling through the KRACKs”, makes two points which have come up on the System Safety mailing list frequently. One is that the IEEE standards business model makes it difficult for researchers to access standards, namely they want you to pay lots of money for them. We have had…

  • Safety and Cybersecurity. Again.

    IEC 61508:2010 is the latest edition of the general functional safety standard for E/E/PE systems. IEC 61511:2016 is the latest edition of the functional safety standard for E/E/PE systems in IACS. Last Thursday I gave a short talk (twice) to the German electrotechnical standardisation organisation DKE’s annual one-day get-together event, now called the Innovation Campus…

  • IACS Safety and Security Intertwined; A Realistic Example

    Restarting a nuclear reactor is a complex and sensitive process. The process is essentially controlled through the neutron density at any point. The density is governed by processes which are fundamentally exponential in time, and is controlled by damping the exponent in various ways. It is physically possible for the process to become uncontrolled, on…

  • SILs, the Safety-Related System Lifecycle and Security Level (Ingo Rolle)

    [Ingo Rolle is the Secretary of the German National Committee responsible for matters concerning IEC 61508 as well as the German National Committee responsible for matters concerning IEC 62443. This is an invited essay. PBL] IEC 61508:2010 is the international standard for functional safety of electrical, electronic and programmable electronic systems. It applies to the…

  • Power Plants and Cyberawareness

    There is a considerable challenge in raising the awareness of engineering-plant personnel about the criticality of the computer systems they might be using. We addressed some electricity blackouts at the Safety-Critical Systems Symposium 2016. In the 2003 North American blackout, the malfunction of two computer systems on which operators and oversight personnel relied was causal…

  • Risk

    There are a few different notions of risk used in dependability engineering. One notion, used in finance and in engineering safety, is from De Moivre (1712, De Mensura Sortis in the Proceedings of the Royal Society) and is (A) the expected value of loss (people in engineering say “combination of severity and likelihood”). A second…