KASTEL Engineering Secure Systems

Engineering Secure Systems, as part of the Helmholtz Association, is committed to research for secure infrastructure systems of the future. We build on the expertise of the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (KASTEL) and the experience of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in the fields of energy, mobility and information. We cooperate with the Research Center for Information Technology (FZI) and the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB in fulfilling the tasks of the Topic, as well as with the Research Center Jülich (FZJ), which deals with the application and development of high-performance computing (HPC) in European information infrastructures. It is important for us to have a holistic approach and a clear practical or application reference of the research work and the developed solutions. We achieve this by bundling the outstanding capabilities of various working groups in the field of IT security.

We develop methods for the development of secure, software-intensive systems and find solutions that are not only secure, but also have guaranteed quality properties (e.g., performance, reliability, usability, and also cost) and achieve the best possible trade-offs between conflicting goals regarding various quality properties as well as societal aspects.

Our topic is divided into the three method-focused research groups

• Secure computation and secure communication
• Human and societal factors
• Quantification of Security

As well as three domain-specific Security Labs on the application areas of

• Energy
• Autonomous mobility
• Industrial Production

In our work on the Topic, our overarching goals are to

• The conception and concretization of methods for quantifying and measuring IT security on different levels (from cryptographic protocols to software systems with corresponding user interfaces) as well as the coordination of the different methods with each other and merging them into a fully integrated method for measuring IT security.
• The creation of a high level of IT security for efficient multi-party computing and reliable critical infrastructures (energy, mobility, production), concretely implemented in the form of four demonstrators for usable security technologies.
• Strengthening our already interdisciplinary expertise through further partnerships to develop long-term viable IT security solutions in selected application fields and to integrate existing IT security expertise into Helmholtz research.