To help incorporate security into future systems engineering visions, a paradigmatic shift is endorsed to reframe systems security as trustworthy, loss-driven, and capabilities-based. Similar research from Sandia National Laboratories has explored cutting-edge approaches to systems security for national security applications. Together, these efforts highlight the need for—and a path toward—a scientific foundation for security.
Leveraging underlying tenets of systems theory, observed security heuristics, and emerging concepts helps triangulate a set of “first principles” as part of a scientific foundation for security as an emergent systems property. This foundation incorporates traditional physical security designs, cyber security architectures, and personnel security programs, as well as the often-ignored interactions between them. These first principles serve as the basis for a set of derived systems security performance axioms that support ongoing efforts in the field.
This approach's logic and designability have been demonstrated through a multilayer network model-based approach for systems security. The structure of this scientific foundation for security offers additional, innovative opportunities to achieve desired levels of trustworthiness, creative mechanisms to meet needs, innovative loss-driven approaches, and enhanced capabilities—all aimed at producing more efficient and effective systems security solutions against current and emerging threats, uncertainties, and complexities.