Introduction to Special Issue on Risk and Trust in Embedded Critical Systems

Abstract

Society has become more and more dependent on critical infrastructures and the embedded computing systems that control them. The dependability of these critical systems, including requirements related to reliability, safety, and security, is of utmost importance and requires specific attention in all phases of the system lifecycle. These systems have traditionally been under strict control of the organization delivering and owning them and their continuous, predictable operation has been closely monitored and maintained. However, critical systems are increasingly connected to the Internet, to peer and vendor sites, or to regulatory bodies and their management and control is often outsourced. The notions of both a system and an organization are more diffuse as critical systems move towards cross-organizational and distributed control structures. No longer is one single organization in control of these systems, rather their dependability may now be affected by operations performed by a third party and security and trust becomes increasingly important and complex. This Risk and Trust in Embedded Critical Systems special issue of TECS focuses on some of the main security challenges facing embedded computing systems design and implementation. The articles in this special issue focus on design and implementation of trusted embedded systems. The first article, “Designing Trusted Embedded Systems from Finite State Machines” by Carson Dunbar and Gang Qu, presents an approach to addressing security and trust issues in sequential design using finite state machines. In the second article, “Combating Software and Sybil Attacks to Data Integrity in CrowdSourced Embedded Systems” by Dua et al., the authors investigate how a trusted sensing peripheral, consisting of a trusted platform module and sensors, can help defend crowd-sourced mobile embedded systems against attacks on data integrity.