Special Issue on Safety and Security in Cyber-Physical Systems of Proceedings of the IEEE

Engineering safety and computer security have traditionally been viewed as separate fields: safety concentrates on the avoidance of physical harm; security protects information and privacy. When computers and physical plants did not interoperate, separation of safety and security was both reasonable and prudent. Given the advent of CPSs, we can no longer consider these problems as separate. Some domain-specific approaches will be required to address problems specific to an application. However, research suggests that many broad-spectrum approaches can be applied to several different application domains.

Cyber–physical and Internet-of-Things systems provide huge benefits over traditional methods for sensing and controlling the physical world. However, those advantages bring with them new concerns due to the interactions between these previously separate technologies. Safety and security of cyber–physical and IoT systems is an emerging discipline that builds on previous work in these separate fields and adds new techniques to minimize the harmful effects of their interactions. Ensuring the safety and security of cyber–physical and IoT systems requires both design-time and runtime efforts. This special issue identifies key concepts and trends in this emerging discipline.

The special issue is devoted to the safety and security issues presented by cyber–physical systems (CPSs) in Proceedings of the IEEE, January, 2018. CPSs use cyber software/hardware to perform real-time control on physical systems. Such systems are widely used in aerospace and automotive, medical, industrial, and critical infrastructure applications.