Security Certification of Modern Systems: from Cloud Computing to Artificial Intelligence

The ongoing evolution of IT (from cloud computing to artificial intelligence) is changing the design, development, and deployment of software/applications and the corresponding IT infrastructures. Despite these technologies having become commonplace, there are still significant obstacles in their adoption in critical scenarios. Among these, assurance issues become pressing and introduce the need to rethink assurance approaches to support the evaluation of non-functional properties (security) of cloud-based, cloud-edge, IoT, and artificial intelligence systems. Proper management of assurance requirements can expedite the adoption of applications built on modern systems by i) increasing user confidence in technologies, ii) supporting a balance between costs, performance, and service quality. These requirements clearly emerge in efforts carried out at the European level, such as the work on cloud system certification conducted by ENISA and the AI Act. The course will provide an overview of approaches to assurance and security in modern systems and applications, discussing and comparing solutions and methodologies developed to verify and certify modern distributed systems and those based on artificial intelligence.