A New Approach to Software Safety, Risk, and Vulnerability Analysis

Software has found its way into almost every part of our lives. Increased automation in the cars we drive can lead to failures which could result in physical injury, unacceptable risk, or cyber security vulnerabilities. In order to prevent accidents, identification of hazards, risks, and security vulnerabilities is required during development. The problem is the traditional hazard analysis techniques—failure effects and modes analysis, fault tree analysis, and root cause analysis—were developed for simplistic hardware controllers and are based on single point failures. Software fails differently than hardware. Most accidents, system failures, and many cyber attacks involving software controlled systems are not caused by software failure (the software stopped working) but instead by unforeseen interactions between the software and other system components. Vicki and Greg Pope explain how to use a robust hazard analysis technique called systemic theoretic process analysis. In actual usage on complex, software controlled systems, this technique has been able to identify more hazards, risks, and security vulnerabilities than the previous methods.