Towards the Integration of Security and Safety Patterns in the Design of Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

The design of safety-critical embedded systems is a complex process that involves the reuse of proven solutions to fulfill a set of requirements. While safety is considered as the major requirement to be satisfied in safety-critical embedded systems, the security attacks can affect the security as well as the safety of these systems. Therefore, ensuring the security of the safety-critical embedded systems is as important as ensuring the safety requirements. The concept of design patterns, which provides common solutions to widely recurring design problems, have been extensively engaged in the design of the hardware and software in many fields, including embedded systems. However, there is an inadequacy of experience with security patterns in the field of safety-critical embedded systems. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach to integrate security patterns with safety patterns in the design of safety-critical embedded systems. Moreover, it presents a customized representation for security patterns to be more relevant to the common safety patterns in the context of safety-critical embedded systems.