Robotic systems are widely used in industry, agriculture, the inspection of infrastructure, and even in our daily lives. The safety and security of robotic systems have become a primary concern as their interaction with humans increases. In this context, attacks on robotic systems have increased for diversified field applications. It is necessary to accurately detect these abnormal events in these systems as soon as possible. However, these systems also need a runtime verification approach on whether they conform to the established specifications. In this study, runtime verification for anomaly detection methods is proposed for the security of the robot operating system (ROS). Firstly, an anomaly detection method is proposed to detect unexpected situations, such as the number of the received packages being decreased under DoS attacks. Then, a holistic runtime verification architecture is proposed for the anomaly detection method. This architecture consists of three major entities: a verification device, an attacker device, and a robotic platform without losing generality. In the verification device, ROSMonitoring and Oracle are used to implement runtime verification. The proposed architecture is verified through an experimental setup. It is shown that the architecture can be used for runtime verification of different anomaly detection algorithms. A discussion on the security of robotic systems is also presented.

Metaverse was recently introduced as an online virtual world or world of worlds that incorporates the augmented/virtual/mixed/extended reality (AR/VR/MR/XR), Internet of Things (IoT), personalization with virtual avatars, interaction and communication interlinking real and/or virtual “things” with “things”. Metaverse users are supposed to live in a digital realm in which such living universes are created either as imaginative or realistic environments. This brings a new creative space for architects in the Architecture-Engineering-Construction (AEC) sector to design new buildings and cities in a semi-realistic digital world as they can be inspired by actual urban settings and augment these real or realistic environments towards a cyber environment. This paper aims to present such a cyber environment, called BIMyVerse, that blends IoT-enabled situational awareness, VR-supported integrated semantic digital twin models incorporating Building Information Model (BIM), Geographical Information System (GIS) and sensory cyberspace and explainable interpretations for better interaction with buildings and urban contexts. The proof of concept studies demonstrate how BIMyVerse can be used for i) situational fire regulation check and monitoring the maintenance status (building-scale); ii) circular economy provisioning through the digital twin of an urban transformation area (urban-scale).

The increasing demand on biometric authentication systems (BASs) has brought the need of secure and privacy‐preserving solutions accepted by a wider community of users. The decision makers pay a great attention to how people react to BASs and their opinions about the features and procedures of the system. In this work, a generic Biometric Technology Acceptance Model (BioTAM) is proposed. BioTAM encounters trust as an objective measure of privacy‐security tradeoff, public willingness and user confidence. BioTAM takes into account social and human factors which prominently affect the wider dissemination and easy penetration of BASs. To scrutinise people's behavioural intention to use a BAS, BioTAM melds traditional Technology Acceptance Model constructs and the trust model offered as a new construct. In order to inspire stakeholders on how BioTAM can be used to assess a BAS, a sample case study is investigated.

Verification and validation (V&V) of systems and system of systems in an industrial context has never been as important as today. The recent developments in automated cyber-physical systems, digital twin environments, and Industry 4.0 applications require effective and comprehensive V&V mechanisms. Verification and Validation of Automated Systems’ Safety and Security (VALU3S), a Horizon 2020 Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking (ECSEL-JU) project started in May 2020, aims to create and evaluate a multi-domain V&V framework that facilitates evaluation of automated systems from component level to system level, with the aim of reducing the time and effort needed to evaluate these systems. VALU3S focuses on V&V for the requirements of safety, cybersecurity, and privacy (SCP). This paper mainly focuses on the elaboration of one of the 13 use cases of VALU3S to identify the SCP issues in an automated robot inspection cell that is being actively used for the quality control assessment of automotive body-in-white. The joint study here embarks on a collaborative approach that puts the V&V methods and workflows for the robotic arms safety trajectory planning and execution, fault injection techniques, cyber-physical security vulnerability assessment, anomaly detection, and SCP countermeasures required for remote control and inspection. The paper also presents cross-links with ECSEL-JU goals and the current advancements in the market and scientific and technological state-of-play.

With the fast adoption of cloud computing, the use of biometric technologies has evolved to adifferent way of providing security, preserving privacy, and analysing personaltraits for various purposes. The main components of any biometric system, suchas biometric sensing, data gathering, feature extraction, identification,verification, recognition, and analytics, are now handled over distributednetworks. Many of the biometric system services are presented over such networkswhich are followed by the creation of a new concept ‘biometric‐as‐a‐service(BaaS)’. Recent BaaS approaches usually focus on identifying the effectivedistributed architectures, policies, and use case recommendations. However,there is a strong need to focus on developing a semantic framework which shouldrely on a biometric ontology. This study presents such an ontology covering theuses of different biometric modalities, evaluation and assessment of biometricsystems, modelling biometric processes, and analyses through interlinkedrelations with biometric stakeholders. In order to shed light on how such anontology is useful for BaaS solutions, a case study focusing on the various usesof biometric modalities is presented. The selected use case addresses the asylumseeker or immigrant identification problems regarding the border securitychallenges where facial biometrics are benefited.

Verification and validation (V&V) are complex processes combining different approaches and incorporating many different methods including many activities. System engineers regularly face the question if their V&V activities lead to better products, and having appropriate criteria at hand for evaluation of safety and cybersecurity of the systems would help to answer such a question. Additionally, when there is a demand to improve the quality of an already managed V&V process, there is a struggle over what criteria to use in order to measure the improvement. This paper presents an extensive set of criteria suitable for safety and cybersecurity evaluation of cyberphysical systems. The evaluation criteria are agreed upon by 60 researchers from 32 academic and industrial organizations jointly working in a large-scale European research project on 13 real-world use cases from the domains of automotive, railway, aerospace, agriculture, healthcare, and industrial robotics.