Dependable and Secure Computing

Dependable and secure Computing – Prof. dr. Jaco van der Pol

Masters involved : Computer Science (CS)

Contributing Institutes : CTIT

ICT systems are used as part of an ever-growing variety of applications and form a critical backbone of our societal infrastructure. Malfunctioning or sabotage of ICT systems incur economic expenses at best, cost lives at worse, or will even disrupt society.

An ICT-system is called dependable if reliance can justifiably be placed on the services it delivers. This should be possible despite the occurrence of physical faults, communication problems, software errors, human operator mistakes, or attacks by malicious intruders.

Dependability and security are interpreted in a broad sense. Depending on the application domain, it includes 7x24 availability, absolute safe and timely behavior, a guaranteed quality-of-service level, the protection of the integrity of financial transactions, enforcement of digital rights and the privacy of users.

Dependable ICT is a challenge, because applications tend to be geographically distributed, have increasingly complex and adaptive functionality, are connected via wired or wireless networks, and should be open for interaction with an unknown, sometimes malicious, environment.

In this Computer Science graduate programme you will learn and develop traditional and novel methods and techniques for analyzing and constructing dependable and secure systems. Traditional means are fault and intrusion detection, prevention, prediction, removal, and tolerance, so that systems keep working even despite faults, errors, or hackers. Emphasis will be put on computational methods, in the following areas: