Finding synergies and conflicts in the design phase

During the design phase, cybersecurity controls and requirements from the concept level are refined into technical security requirements and architectural elements and interfaces at the software and hardware levels. The refined security and safety requirements need another round of harmonization so that synergies can be identified and conflicts can be eliminated. In this stage, synergies are easier to identify as the mechanisms become more concrete due to requirements being allocated to the components of the architecture. When safety and security objectives overlap, a common strategy is to leverage security mechanisms to satisfy a safety objective and vice versa.

Leveraging safety and security mechanisms

As mentioned previously, safety and security objectives overlap in three main areas:

• Achieving freedom from interference
• Protecting data integrity
• Detecting and recovering from availability faults or attacks
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