The general objective of this chapter is to introduce the basic concepts and terminology of the domain of dependability. Concepts such as reliability, safety, or security, have been used inconsistently by different communities of researchers: The realtime system community, the secure computing community, and so forth, each had its own “lingo” and was referring to concepts such as faults, errors, and failures without the required formal foundation. This changed in the early 1990s, when Jean-Claude Laprie finally introduced a tentative model for dependable computing. To date, the Laprie model of dependability is the most widespread and accepted formal definition for the terms that play a key role in this book. As a consequence, the rest of this chapter introduces that model.
Basic concepts and taxonomy of dependable and secure computing