Myron Hecht is a Senior Project Leader at The Aerospace Corporation where he specializes in reliability, safety, and systems engineering for satellites and ground control systems. He also is a consultant to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in reactor safety and control systems and a lecturer at the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His current research is on Model Based System Engineering and its application to reliability, availability, and safety analysis. He has previously made research contributions in the areas of integrated hardware/software reliability modeling analysis, fault tolerant computing, and real time distributed control systems. He has served on standards committees for reliability, computers in nuclear power plants, and software in avionics systems. He is an author of more than 90 refereed publications in reliability, safety, products liability, and systems engineering. Myron holds a B.S. in Chemistry, an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering, an M.B.A., and a J.D. degree all from UCLA.
This talk describes (1) application of FMEAs for integrated cybersecurity, reliability, and safety analysis and (2) use of SysML for the automatic generation of such analyses and demonstrates the application of this approach to a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) information network. The systematic and thorough analysis approach mandated by FMEAs have resulted in their application for cybersecurity in information systems, FMEAs provide a method of correlating end effects with causes and as such, can be an important aid to intrusion detection as well as for incident response. Ideally, FMEAs should be done at multiple stages in the development process to identify failure detection and recovery deficiencies as early as possible and to take corrective action when it is still feasible to do so from the perspective of cost, schedule, and technical solutions. The practice of developing FMEAs “early and often” in the design process has not been feasible using traditional manual techniques in most development programs because of their cost and skilled labor requirements. Hence, there has been significant interest in the development of techniques based on design and modeling languages such as SysML and AADL.
