Our modern societies and economies are open and connected – and this makes them vulnerable. Digital connectivity means that hacker attacks are becoming increasingly dangerous and far-reaching. Security research aims to analyse different types of vulnerability, minimise the risks, and design resilient systems that can recover as quickly as possible when they are compromised.
One of the biggest challenges facing security research is how to quantify security – in other words, to develop indicators that allow us to compare different risks. This would help businesses and other organisations to make evidence-based decisions about their security measures.
Jörn Müller-Quade, spokesperson of the Thematic Network on Security and chair of the Plattform Lernende Systeme’s IT Security working group
Cybersecurity is a fundamental requirement for a successful digital transformation and is key to Germany’s and Europe’s technological leadership. Accordingly, cybersecurity has been chosen as the topic of the second publication in the acatech HORIZONS series.
Resilience as the security strategy of the future
acatech sees resilience as the security strategy of the future – quarantining by inflexible protection mechanisms will be replaced by the ability to adapt rapidly. Resilience by design will help critical infrastructure to keep functioning reliably or return itself to a safe state in the event of unforeseen disruption. Accordingly, the acatech POSITION PAPER Resilien-Tech argues that resilience must be built into systems right from the design stage.
Contributions to a systems theory of security
Security is a complex topic, affecting everything from local public transport and airports to offshore wind farms. In these contexts, human-machine interactions can be just as important as factors such as cooperation between employees. We do not yet have a theory that allows us to describe or measure security in these kinds of socio-technical systems. acatech has started to address this gap by publishing a series of papers that could contribute to a cross-disciplinary systems theory of security.
Publications
