High Assurance Rigorous Digital Engineering for Nuclear Safety (HARDENS)

Abstract: In the **High Assurance Rigorous Digital Engineering for Nuclear Safety** (HARDENS) project, Galois has developed a high-assurance, safety-critical demonstration system for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission using Rigorous Digital Engineering (RDE).  The system in question is a Digital Instrumentation and Control (DI&C) system for Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), and is called the Reactor Trip System (RTS).

RDE is the combination of *Model-based Engineering*, *Digital Engineering*, and *Applied Formal Methods*.  The engineering focus of RDE is broad, as we have used it to perform *software, firmware, hardware, systems, domain, requirements, product line, safety, and security engineering* of *high-assurance, secure-by-design systems*.

The HARDENS project includes nearly all of these kinds of engineering, but for security engineering at this time.

My HCSS talk will summarize Rigorous Digital Engineering and explain it by focusing on the NRC RTS system as an expository vehicle.

Dr. Joseph Kiniry is a Principal Investigator at Galois.  He is also the Principled CEO and Chief Scientist of the public benefit corporation Free & Fair. Since 2002 he has held permanent positions at four universities in Denmark, Ireland, and The Netherlands, the last of which was a Full Professor and Head of the Software Engineering Section at the Technical University of Denmark.

Joe has extensive experience in formal methods; high-assurance
systems, safety, security, software, firmware, and hardware
engineering; foundations of computer science and mathematics; and cybersecurity. Specific areas that he has worked in include system, software, and hardware verification foundations and tools, digital election systems and democracies, cryptography, smart-cards, smart-phones, critical systems for nation states and national security, and CAD systems for asynchronous hardware design.