SynBioTrace: Integrating Safety and Security Artifacts to Build Assurance Cases for Synthetic Biology Applications

SynBioTrace: Integrating Safety and Security Artifacts to Build Assurance Cases for Synthetic Biology Applications

연구 분야: Verification

학회: 2024 IEEE 35th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)

The rapidly advancing cyber-physical domain of synthetic biology modifies the functionality of micro-organisms which can act as living computational devices. Applications include intelligent drug delivery, customized cancer therapies, and pollution detection and mitigation. While many synthetic biology applications have been proposed, prototyped, and even deployed, these systems often lack standard approaches to verify their safety and security. One approach, the assurance case, provides evidence demonstrating proper implementation in the target application, and is often used in other safety-critical domains. However, synthetic biologists lack guidance in developing assurance arguments and tracing safety and security requirements to evidence as required for building assurance cases. Although there has been some research combining safety and security artifacts, such techniques often require extensive expertise from different domains and may not be accessible to synthetic biologists. In this paper we propose SynBioTrace, an assistive process to help propagate information from risk-based analyses of such systems to preliminary assurance cases. SynBioTrace preserves traceability among its steps so that the assurance case can be further refined. We apply and evaluate it through a case study based on a real-world synthetic biology application. Our case study suggests this approach could aid synthetic biologists in identifying, documenting, and structuring safety and security artifacts, as well as linking evidence to support traceability for a complete, integrated assurance case.