Establishing a foundational understanding of functional safety and cybersecurity

Implementing an integrated approach to safety and security engineering results in frequent interactions between safety and security teams. These teams analyze risk from different perspectives and are spread across different product life cycles, such as manufacturing, development, and testing. While the expectation is that neither team will become a full expert in the other’s domain, it is valuable for practitioners from each domain to be familiar with the terms, concepts, and general methods and tools available in each approach. This eases the conversation to help understand the areas of concern and why they are important from each perspective. Let’s look at an example where lack of a common understanding produces a real problem for a safety and security-critical system. During a safety analysis of a feature that controls how the system is booted, safety engineers discover that a rare corruption...