Systems thinking for safety and security
The fundamental challenge facing security professionals is preventing losses, be they operational, financial or mission losses. As a result, one could argue that security professionals share this challenge with safety professionals. Despite their shared challenge, there is little evidence that recen...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
2015
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96965 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8720-8554 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6294-8890 |
| _version_ | 1826211092015087616 |
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| author | Young, William Edward Leveson, Nancy G. |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Young, William Edward Leveson, Nancy G. |
| author_sort | Young, William Edward |
| collection | MIT |
| description | The fundamental challenge facing security professionals is preventing losses, be they operational, financial or mission losses. As a result, one could argue that security professionals share this challenge with safety professionals. Despite their shared challenge, there is little evidence that recent advances that enable one community to better prevent losses have been shared with the other for possible implementation. Limitations in current safety approaches have led researchers and practitioners to develop new models and techniques. These techniques could potentially benefit the field of security. This paper describes a new systems thinking approach to safety that may be suitable for meeting the challenge of securing complex systems against cyber disruptions. Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis for Security (STPA-Sec) augments traditional security approaches by introducing a top-down analysis process designed to help a multidisciplinary team consisting of security, operations, and domain experts identify and constrain the system from entering vulnerable states that lead to losses. This new framework shifts the focus of the security analysis away from threats as the proximate cause of losses and focuses instead on the broader system structure that allowed the system to enter a vulnerable system state that the threat exploits to produce the disruption leading to the loss. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T15:00:46Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/96965 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T15:00:46Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/969652022-10-01T23:55:52Z Systems thinking for safety and security Young, William Edward Leveson, Nancy G. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division Young, William Edward Leveson, Nancy G. The fundamental challenge facing security professionals is preventing losses, be they operational, financial or mission losses. As a result, one could argue that security professionals share this challenge with safety professionals. Despite their shared challenge, there is little evidence that recent advances that enable one community to better prevent losses have been shared with the other for possible implementation. Limitations in current safety approaches have led researchers and practitioners to develop new models and techniques. These techniques could potentially benefit the field of security. This paper describes a new systems thinking approach to safety that may be suitable for meeting the challenge of securing complex systems against cyber disruptions. Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis for Security (STPA-Sec) augments traditional security approaches by introducing a top-down analysis process designed to help a multidisciplinary team consisting of security, operations, and domain experts identify and constrain the system from entering vulnerable states that lead to losses. This new framework shifts the focus of the security analysis away from threats as the proximate cause of losses and focuses instead on the broader system structure that allowed the system to enter a vulnerable system state that the threat exploits to produce the disruption leading to the loss. 2015-05-12T16:56:33Z 2015-05-12T16:56:33Z 2013-12 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper 9781450320153 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96965 William Young and Nancy Leveson. 2013. Systems thinking for safety and security. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-8. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8720-8554 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6294-8890 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2523649.2530277 Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC '13) Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) MIT web domain |
| spellingShingle | Young, William Edward Leveson, Nancy G. Systems thinking for safety and security |
| title | Systems thinking for safety and security |
| title_full | Systems thinking for safety and security |
| title_fullStr | Systems thinking for safety and security |
| title_full_unstemmed | Systems thinking for safety and security |
| title_short | Systems thinking for safety and security |
| title_sort | systems thinking for safety and security |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/96965 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8720-8554 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6294-8890 |
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