At their heart, many critical systems and system infrastructures are composed of real-time and embedded systems (RTES). For example, RTES control our power grids, maintain our smart homes, steer our vehicles or they host the software in road-side units that allow our vehicles to drive more safely and more efficiently. For sure, they will open the way to even more challenging applications, such as in autonomous and cooperating vehicles, terrestrial or aerial.

However, most of these RTES are distributed or networked, which makes them vulnerable both to accidental faults and targeted attacks and advanced and persistent threats. Worse, compromise of a few nodes may bring down the entire system, in particular if attacks persist.

The grand challenges brought in by these scenarios include ensuring continuous unmaintained operation under faults and attacks. Systems may possibly utilize easier to upgrade computation resources in mobile phones or road side units whose trustworthiness needs to be established while the RTES approaches these units. And while attackers may try to compromise the RTES’ functionality or timing, we seek to protect the integrity and timeliness of systems and the privacy of their users. Mastering these challenges requires the expertise of several research areas, and so, the goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and engineers from the security and dependability, distributed systems and real-time communities, in order to discuss and promote new and exciting research ideas and initiatives, and to identify and discuss the challenges that lie ahead for such critical applications.

CERTS’17 strives for an inclusive and diverse program and solicits short and long technical papers on open problems, experiments, case studies, new ideas, or future challenges.