Safe & Secure Systems

The Competence Center for Safe and Secure Systems headed by Prof. Dr. Rolf Drechsler concentrates the long ongoing experience of DFKI in the areas of innovative software development techniques, safety design, IT-security, and public security. 

It aims at the collaboration in research and development providing support in safety and security issues as well as at the development of corresponding tools and products.  In particular, the focus is on the following areas:

• development of formal notions of security and corresponding analysis tools,

• formal modeling, analysis and verification of safe/security-critical components or systems, 

• development of security mechanisms for various application domains (e.g industry 4.0, health, critical infrastructures, cyber-physical systems),

• development of security policies for complex systems and security mechanisms to compose secure components to secure systems (security by design).

The competence center is engaged in a wide range of activities from the development of tailored security methodologies to their support by corresponding tools and their application in developing secure systems. Examples in the area of IT-security are the verification of security protocols as well as the modeling and verification of formal security policies (both access control and information flow control). In the area of safety a main focus is on the development of safe hybrid systems and robots. 

When developing safe or secure systems the consistency of the various objects and documents arising during the different development steps becomes an issue. Thus, the competence center engineers tools to support a corresponding management of change keeping a development in a consistent state.