Safety and security is a key requirement for many cyber-physical systems. Indeed, there are many situations where a cyber-attack or a safety issue may cause catastrophic consequences involving the loss of human lives. To address these issues, the RETIS Lab investigates methods for improving the robustness of cyber-physical systems against cyber attacks and software misbehaviors, adopting model-driven engineering (MDE) approaches from the early design stages.
Research efforts include modeling and automatic code generation of safe and secure AUTOSAR components in automotive systems, enhancing security through hypervisor technology and multi-domain software architectures, exploiting hardware mechanisms to ensure security in COTS platforms (e.g., through Trustzone and Pointer Authentication Codes), security mechanisms for FPGA system-on-chips, security in cloud computing, and the related recovery strategies.

The most relevant investigated topics are the following:

• Security and safety for hypervisor technology and multi-domain software architectures;
• Security mechanisms for FPGA systems-on-chips;
• Security and safety of AI algorithms;
• Security in Cloud Infrastructures for Real-Time and High-Performance Services;
• Security and safety in AUTOSAR automotive systems.
• Support for multi-core processing in AUTOSAR and AMALTHEA based designs;
• Accounting for energy-management capabilities of the hardware, like DVFS and big.LITTLE ARM architectures, within the design flow;
• Enrichment of MDE-based approaches with GPU and FPGA accelerated functional blocks;
• Automatic code generation for GPU and FPGA accelerated designs, and identification from the early design stages of possible critical factors that might impair correctness of a design.

Key Recent Projects

• Concluded: SAFURE: Safety And Security By Design For Interconnected Mixed-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems, Horizon 2020, 2016-2018.
• Concluded: Trusted domain implementation based on ARM TrustZone and "Security by design" - MILS Technologies. Industrial project, 2018-2019.
• Concluded: Temporal isolation and security for future automotive systems using MILS technologies and hardware-based security technologies. Industrial project, 2019-2020.