Software Engineering Institute

Cyber-physical systems seamlessly integrate computational and physical resources to form intelligent systems. Such systems could be associated with safety-critical operations, such as autonomous driving. The continuous evolution and adaptive nature of these systems challenge the practices of secure software developments, including the practices of threat modeling. We discuss in this talk, first, about the practices of changing secure-software in the industry. Then, we report about the interviews that we conducted on the practices of threat modeling of Cyber-physical systems. Next, we propose a semi-automated approach for threats modeling of Cyber-physical systems and discuss the challenges that we faced in our application of the approach on a real-word case-study.

Dr. Lotfi ben Othmane is Assistant Teaching Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is leading the Engineering Secure Smart Cyber-Physical Systems Lab at Iowa State University, USA. Previously, he was a Research Scientist and then Head of the Secure Software Engineering department at Fraunhofer SIT, Germany. Lotfi received his Ph.D. from Western Michigan University (WMU), USA, in 2010; the M.S. in computer science from University of Sherbrooke, Canada, in 2000; and the B.S in information systems from University of Economics and Management of Sfax, Tunisia, in 1995. He works currently on engineering secure cyber-physical systems.

Watch the video on YouTube.