Methodology for Software Trustworthiness Measurement

Cognitive Concepts (CC) and High Performance Technologies, Inc. (HPTi) will support the Air Force in defining objective measures of software trustworthiness, not just for embedded systems, but for a broad range of applications. The innovation is to establish measures of the inherent risks in software systems and to provide tools to implement those measures. The measurements we define will be fundamentally sound from a theoretical standpoint and will be practical as well. CC and HPTi will identify measures that are appropriate for all aspects of assurance and integrate these measures to form a coherent, comprehensive theory for measuring software system trustworthiness. Clear guidelines will be provided to the implementers and repeatable results will be obtained by independent applications of the measures. We offer a simple yet highly practical solution to the software trustworthiness measurement problem. It is summarized in this paragraph. Software trustworthiness should be a user-oriented measure. Software reliability is a user-oriented measure. The software reliability definition can be expanded to be applied to the software security and software safety domains. Our software trustworthiness measure will cover reliability, security and safety to provide an aggregate measure of the inherent risk of a software system.