Systems Engineering Grand Challenges in Security and Safety

Abstract

The advancement of technology and information access has lowered threat barriers, and security challenges are diffusing across all domains, many of which have not been designed to be secure for current and future vulnerabilities. In addition to others, there are many gaps in current systems engineering (SE) security design processes, and there is a need to reevaluate how we design systems in response to real and potential security threats. Systems that were developed without any consideration of operational threats now are being disrupted, and systems are being used by threat actors in ways that were never intended uses of the system. Thus the consideration of system response to threats in the development phase has become a necessary process across many domains that have no experience with safe and secure design strategies. Uncertainty and rapid change in the threat environment and future threat scenarios prevent a requirements-driven and model-based design process that produces dynamic design strategies and solutions. Future systems need to be designed for agility in response to context-driven changes, resilience to threat intrusions and cascading failure modes, and the ability to gracefully degrade and/or self-heal in response to unintended use. Methods and tools must support greenfield (new) and brownfield (existing) implementations.

Through a series of workshops organized by the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) that brought together distinguished systems engineering researchers and professionals from across the United States, this paper documents the identification and synthesis of research gaps in the area of systems engineering as related to security and safety. These include research needs related to improved system protection; agility and adaptation; modeling and simulation of systems that reflect the adaptive behavior of internal and external actors; SE methods and tools that are self-descriptive and capture real-world information/data; tools that infer potentially unsafe, vulnerable, and/or non-secure implementations; mechanisms for self-governance and self-healing; and an ethics framework for design trades. From these gaps and related future needs, relevant stakeholders and preliminary research topics and threads are identified, and a roadmap is put forward for future research to address these Grand Challenges.