Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS - a collection of Technical Notes Part 1

This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. Part 2: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and Guidelines

Innovative matrix for applying a food systems approach for developing interventions to address nutrient deficiencies in indigenous communities in India: a study protocol.

BACKGROUND: Indigenous communities retain knowledge of the land and food resources rooted in historical continuity within their region of residence. Food systems research can be leveraged to identify strategies to encourage sustainable use of complex multi-species agroforestry systems by indigenous communities contributing to nutritional needs while simultaneously preserving the ecosystems and their benefits to society. Till date, the analyses of food systems have predominantly focused on high income countries often overlooking the alternatives (dietary and production) that would be most relevant to low and middle income countries (LMIC). Thus, innovative methodological approaches are needed to comprehensively characterize diverse food systems in LMICs with special reference to indigenous communities. DESIGN: This protocol paper describes a food systems approach that will be employed to understand diverse and dynamic food systems of vulnerable tribal communities of Jharkhand, India and leverage their agroforestry systems to improve dietary diversity, nutrition status and address food security. Four tribal groups namely Santhal, Ho, Munda and Sauria Paharia of Godda, West Singhbhum and Khunti districts of Jharkhand would be studied. This will be an exploratory cross-sectional study design, along with a longitudinal component to capture seasonality in dietary intake and agricultural diversity. A mixed methods approach will be used based on a conceptual framework on drivers of food systems, food supply chain, food environment (both wild & cultivated, and market food environments), as well as consumer behaviour and maternal and child health outcomes in tribal communities. The quantitative surveys will be conducted on socio-economic, demographic profile of households, their availability of, access to and utilization of food environment and nutritional status of reproductive age group women and children under 5 years. Qualitative enquiries will examine barriers and facilitators to increase sustainable production, procurement and consumption of indigenous foods. The final outcome would be development of interventions to promote indigenous food consumption. DISCUSSION: By utilizing a combination of value chain analysis and 'Optifoods linear programming software' that will use above information on indigenous community, dietary intake, nutritional status and food environment, evidence based interventions promoting indigenous food systems aimed at addressing food and nutritional security of tribal communities will be developed

Why We Cannot (Yet) Ensure the Cybersecurity of Safety-Critical Systems

There is a growing threat to the cyber-security of safety-critical systems. The introduction of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software, including Linux, specialist VOIP applications and Satellite Based Augmentation Systems across the aviation, maritime, rail and power-generation infrastructures has created common, vulnerabilities. In consequence, more people now possess the technical skills required to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in safety-critical systems. Arguably for the first time there is the potential for cross-modal attacks leading to future ‘cyber storms’. This situation is compounded by the failure of public-private partnerships to establish the cyber-security of safety critical applications. The fiscal crisis has prevented governments from attracting and retaining competent regulators at the intersection of safety and cyber-security. In particular, we argue that superficial similarities between safety and security have led to security policies that cannot be implemented in safety-critical systems. Existing office-based security standards, such as the ISO27k series, cannot easily be integrated with standards such as IEC61508 or ISO26262. Hybrid standards such as IEC 62443 lack credible validation. There is an urgent need to move beyond high-level policies and address the more detailed engineering challenges that threaten the cyber-security of safety-critical systems. In particular, we consider the ways in which cyber-security concerns undermine traditional forms of safety engineering, for example by invalidating conventional forms of risk assessment. We also summarise the ways in which safety concerns frustrate the deployment of conventional mechanisms for cyber-security, including intrusion detection systems

Evaluation of software dependability

It has been said that the term software engineering is an aspiration not a description. We would like to be able to claim that we engineer software, in the same sense that we engineer an aero-engine, but most of us would agree that this is not currently an accurate description of our activities. My suspicion is that it never will be. From the point of view of this essay – i.e. dependability evaluation – a major difference between software and other engineering artefacts is that the former is pure design. Its unreliability is always the result of design faults, which in turn arise as a result of human intellectual failures. The unreliability of hardware systems, on the other hand, has tended until recently to be dominated by random physical failures of components – the consequences of the ‘perversity of nature’. Reliability theories have been developed over the years which have successfully allowed systems to be built to high reliability requirements, and the final system reliability to be evaluated accurately. Even for pure hardware systems, without software, however, the very success of these theories has more recently highlighted the importance of design faults in determining the overall reliability of the final product. The conventional hardware reliability theory does not address this problem at all. In the case of software, there is no physical source of failures, and so none of the reliability theory developed for hardware is relevant. We need new theories that will allow us to achieve required dependability levels, and to evaluate the actual dependability that has been achieved, when the sources of the faults that ultimately result in failure are human intellectual failures