Software diversity

Software diversity refers to the practice of using multiple variations of software, including diverse programming languages, algorithms, and operating systems, to ensure safety and reduce cyber-risks. This approach may involve diverse development teams, design diversity, and hardware diversity, but software diversity alone has been shown to be effective in achieving these goals.From: Industrial Communication Technology Handbook [2017], Integrating redundancy, diversity, and hardening to improve security of industrial internet of things [2020], Safety, Reliability and Risk Analysis [2019]

Communication in Train Control

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Published in Richard Zurawski, Industrial Communication Technology Handbook, 2017

Heinz Kantz, Stefan Resch, Christoph Scherrer

A 1-out-of-1 system achieves safe program executing on a single computing channel. The common approach for ensuring safety on such a system is software diversity. Naturally, fault tolerance is not possible with one 1oo1 system alone.

Integrating redundancy, diversity, and hardening to improve security of industrial internet of things

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Published in Cyber-Physical Systems, 2020

Aron Laszka, Waseem Abbas, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Xenofon Koutsoukos

We model diversity as deploying a diverse set of implementation types (e.g. employing different software or hardware implementations for components that perform the same task). Prior work has shown that software diversity alone may be effective at reducing cyber-risks [7,8]. In our framework, we model diversity as selecting different implementations to be deployed for each component (or at least attempting to use as many distinct sets as possible).

Software diversity

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Communication in Train Control

Integrating redundancy, diversity, and hardening to improve security of industrial internet of things