The Priority Programme at a Glance

Motivation

This Priority Programme assumed that a paradigm shift in IT-security is necessary in order to reliably guarantee the security of complex software systems. The current trust-based and mechanism-centric approaches to IT-security were to be complemented by property-oriented solutions. This paradigm shift was to enable a trustworthy certification of system-wide, technical security guarantees that adequately respects the semantics of programs and of security requirements. Bridging the gap from security in-the-small to security in-the-large involved the improvement of conceptual foundations, the development of analysis and engineering tools, and their migration into practice. Collaborations between multiple sub-disciplines of Computer Science, primarily formal methods, IT-security, and programming languages, were necessary to achieve the objectives of the programme.