About IFIP Working Group 10.4

Increasingly, individuals and organizations are developing or procuring sophisticated computing systems on whose services they need to place great reliance. In differing circumstances, the focus will be on differing properties of such services -- e.g., continuity, performance, real-time response, ability to avoid catastrophic failures, prevention of deliberate privacy intrusions.

The notion of dependability, defined as the trustworthiness of a computing system which allows reliance to be justifiably placed on the service it delivers, enables these various concerns to be subsumed within a single conceptual framework. Dependability thus includes as special cases such attributes as reliability, availability, safety, security.

The Working Group is aimed at identifying and integrating approaches, methods and techniques for specifying, designing, building, assessing, validating, operating and maintaining computer systems which should exhibit some or all of these attributes.

Specifically, the Working Group is concerned with progress in:

1. Understanding of faults (accidental faults, be they physical, design-induced, originating from human interaction; intentional faults) and their effects.
2. Specification and design methods for dependability.
3. Methods for error detection and processing, and for fault treatment.
4. Validation (testing, verification, evaluation) and design for testability and verifiability.
5. Assessing dependability through modeling and measurement.

IFIP Working Group 10.4 was established by the IFIP General Assembly in October 1980, and operates under IFIP Technical Committee TC-10, "Computer Systems Technology".