These systems include both physical components, wired and wireless technologies, the data they contain and transmit, and the software that manipulates these data. HCS research requires integrating these fields and creating standard metrics for properties such as safety, security, performance, and reliability. Developers need theories and tools to predict the confidence of different architectures to be able to use high confidence methods to compose high confidence components. A challenge is to develop an integrated security fabric in which trusted components can interact closely and rapidly, while mutually suspicious agents can cooperate through security gateways. Central to this challenge for security is scalability of such an integrated security fabric.
Scalability is also critical for other properties of high confidence such as performance.
Methods and tools such as automated and semi-automated verifiers have not been demonstrated for complex distributed systems, and as systems get ever more complex the issue of scalability becomes critical. Mechanical verification tools already used for verifying important kernels must be extended to make them easier to use and interoperable for distributed operating systems. Research support for the development of educational programs for safety-critical systems is of vital importance. To improve the educational environment for high confidence systems, industry, government, and academia must organize curricula, case studies, electronic textbooks on the Internet, and shared software. The HCS research includes support of the development of a suite of prototypical high confidence system specifications so that students in different universities can work on similar sets of reasonably realistic problems.