Editorial: security and reliability of critical systems

Abstract

Command and control applications are a vital part of modern distributed critical systems in various application areas, such as generation and distribution of electric power, storage and distribution of gas and oil, water supplies, banking and finance, government services, traffic control, and critical infrastructures. Centralized control is being replaced by distributed and more open control systems that possess increasing levels of autonomy. Communication networks, software architectures and intelligent systems are at the core of these developments. Such systems must be able to recover from the failures and intrusion in order to maintain their functions. Therefore, achieving resilience and security in such complex, interconnected, and interdependent systems, requires an integrated approach in engineering to address of resilience considerations across all constituent systems, cyber and physical.The main purpose of this special issue is to invite researchers from academia and industry to contribute with ideas, show up problems and describe solutions regarding security and reliability of critical systems and infrastructures, particularly aiming to promote more state-of-the-art research in this area.In particular, critical infrastructures protection is a complex and delicate activity, which can impact human lives and material goods, threatened by both natural phenomena, as well as the consequences of human errors. In this direction, Choras et al. (2015) present key results of the research activity conducted in the framework of FP7 CIPRNet project. Authors show an extended analysis of services composing the decision support system for critical infrastructures protection. Specific decision makers are presented to support 'decision-making process', both in the preparedness ''cold'' phase, as well as in the crisis ''hot'' phase. Moreover, dependability evaluation is an important, mandatory step in designing and analyzing critical systems. Accurate models are required to deal with dynamic, dependent behaviors, especially in complex systems. Therefore, Distefano (2015) identifies the main dynamicdependent aspects that can affect the dependability of a critical system. Starting from the concept of dependence, author proposes an analytic formal framework for representing critical system dependability, as well as presents specific common dynamic aspects of dynamic-dependent systems.As regards security aspects, in Li et al. (2015), authors propose a novel image authentication algorithm based on trisecting the original image to generate the authentication blocks as small as possible. In this algorithm, an image is split adaptively into some authentication blocks, which are composed of a number of fine-grained basic blocks. A recursive trisection method and adjacent strategies are adopted to connect basic blocks in sequence into a link. When the watermark payload cannot be embedded into an authentication block, the algorithm tries to merge only one basic block from the blocks linked to current authentication block. Theoretical...