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Problems and solutions regarding generalized functional safety in cyberspace

¹ National Digital Switching System Engineering & Technological R&D Center, Zhengzhou 450002, China
² Purple Mountain Laboratories, Nanjing 211111, China

^* Corresponding author (email: ndscwjx@126.com)

Received: 9 December 2021
Revised: 17 January 2022
Accepted: 25 January 2022

Abstract

The common endogenous security problems in cyberspace and related attack threats have posed subversive challenges to conventional theories and methods of functional safety. In the current design of the cyber physical system (CPS), functional safety and cyber security are increasingly intertwined and inseparable, which evolve into the generalized functional safety (S&S) problem. The conventional reliability and cybersecurity technologies are unable to provide security assurance with quantifiable design and verification metrics in response to the cyberattacks in hardware and software with common endogenous security problems, and the functional safety of CPS facilities or device has become a frightening ghost. The dynamic heterogeneity redundancy (DHR) architecture and coding channel theory (CCT) proposed by the cyberspace endogenous security paradigm could handle random failures and uncertain network attacks in an integrated manner, and its generalized robust control mechanism can solve the universal problem of quantitative design for functional safety under probability or improbability perturbation. As a generalized functional safety enabling structure, DHR opens up a new direction to solve the common endogenous security problems in the cross-disciplinary fields of cyberspace.