La Sapienza - Università di Roma

The pSHIELD project aims at being a pioneer investigation to address Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in the context of Embedded Systems (ESs) as “built in” rather than as “add-on” functionalities, proposing and perceiving with this strategy the first step toward SPD certification for future ES. The leading concept is to demonstrate composability of SPD technologies. Starting from current SPD solutions in ESs, the project will develop new technologies and consolidate the available ones in a solid basement that will become the reference milestone for a new generation of “SPD-ready” ESs. pSHIELD will approach SPD at 4 different levels: node, network, middleware and overlay. For each level, the state of the art in SPD of single technologies and solutions will be improved and integrated (hardware and communication technologies, cryptography, middleware, smart SPD applications, etc.). The SPD technologies will be enhanced with composable functionality, in order to fit in the pSHIELD architectural framework. The composability of pSHIELD architectural framework will have great impact on the system design costs and time to market of new SPD solutions in ESs. At the same time, the integrated use of SPD metrics in the pSHIELD framework will have impact on the development cycles of SPD in ESs because the qualification, (re-)certification and (re-)validation process of a pSHIELD framework instance will be faster, easier and widely accepted. The pSHIELD approach is based on modularity and expandability.