Achieving principled assuredly trustworthy composable systems and networks

Huge challenges exist with systems and networks that must dependably satisfy stringent requirements for security, reliability, and other attributes of trustworthiness. Drawing on what we have learned over the past decades, our CHATS project seeks to establish a coherent common-sense approach toward trustworthy systems. The approach encompasses comprehensive sets of requirements, inherently sound architectures that can be predictably composed out of well-conceived subsystems, highly principled development techniques, good software engineering disciplines, sound operational practices, and judiciously applied assurance measures. Although such an approach is likely to seem completely old-hat to some researchers and totally impractical to commercial developers, the wisdom thus embodied is seldom used consistently (if at all) in practice; if it were used wisely, much of the untrustworthiness in today´s systems would simply disappear. The paper briefly summarizes our approach and its potential benefits.