Current Research
Reliability and security of IT systems have become a major concern of individuals and are of vital importance for society as a whole. The development of systems that are trustworthy, however, is not an easy task. This is due to the complexity of modern IT systems as well as to the manifold possibilities to attack these systems. The numerous malfunctions and vulnerabilities of current systems show that the challenge of building reliable and secure IT systems is not yet tackled in a satisfactory fashion.
Our research focuses on making IT systems more reliable and more secure. We develop formal methods and supporting tools that can be applied in the software development process for ensuring a high quality of the resulting systems. We support model building for avoiding conceptual errors during early development phases. Moreover, we support the formal analysis of systems and system models for either verifying that given requirements are met or for detecting existing errors. We evaluate our methods and tools in case studies and also in the modeling and analysis of real systems.
We are currently involved in two research projects: FM-SecEng (funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG) and Mobius (funded by the European Union, EU).