Background
Keeping safety-critical systems up to date is made more difficult by certification requirements and the complexity of modern system architectures. Certifications often involve a significant investment of time and money. In practice, this often means that once a system has been certified, it is no longer modified.
This problem is further exacerbated by the increasing complexity of modern systems. They are often divided into multiple components or subsystems, which are frequently certified individually. As a result, however, consideration of their interactions is often neglected.
When it comes to updates, changes to a component or subsystem can cause unexpected interactions with other parts of the system, thereby affecting the behavior of the entire system. The effort required to analyze such dependencies, as well as the associated uncertainty, make updates considerably more difficult or even impossible.
In addition, the system will most likely be unavailable during updates and recertification, which is tantamount to a functional failure. In the context of critical infrastructure, it is particularly important to avoid such outages. The combination of technical risk, potential service disruption, and regulatory burden often leads to updates being delayed or performed only rarely—in part to avoid recertification. This increases the risk that known security vulnerabilities will persist for extended periods of time.
Aim
The AKOS program aims to explore new approaches that will enable safety-critical complex systems to be updated more quickly, tested more thoroughly, and certified more efficiently.
Disruptive Risk Research
Certifying a system as a whole—including all subsystems, individual components, and their interdependencies—presents operators of critical infrastructure with technical, economic, and legal challenges.
A technology that solves these problems would need to integrate seamlessly into existing processes and incorporate the connection between physical and software components. Furthermore, there are issues arising from the certification process. How can new technology be used for certification in a legally compliant manner? And how can certifiers be supported from a technical perspective so that the economic disadvantages and risks of the certification process can be minimized?