As part of the Helmholtz Association, KASTEL contributes to the Topic 3 “Engineering Secure Systems” (ESS) in Program 1 “Engineering Digital Futures” (EDF) of the Helmholtz Research Field “Information”.

Engineering Secure Systems (ESS) requires methods to systematically specify, model, develop, evaluate, and evolve software-intensive systems including various layers from the cryptographic primitives to the user interfaces, particularly under the constraints inherent to a specific domain. The key objective of the Topic ESS is the quantification of security and its application to engineering secure software-intensive systems, particularly in energy, mobility, and production systems.

To illustrate the necessity for measuring IT security, different demonstrators are developed based on interdisciplinary research. This enables the development of viable long-term IT security solutions.

Within the Topic ESS, the MCSE group studies how to model security-related design decisions and assumptions and how to trace such decisions automatically to natural language documentation. Additionally, the group is working on concepts how to distribute such models across multiple organizations in a privacy-preserving way.

With this research, MCSE is involved in the ESS-Subtopics "Methods for Engineering Secure Systems", "Engineering Security for Energy Systems" and "Engineering Security for Mobility Systems".