Mathias Ekstedt

Today, society is extremely dependent on well-functioning IT systems. We notice this in our daily lives with computers, phones, electricity meters, dishwashing machines and so on. In the public and private sectors, there are hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of IT systems that support the business or service provided. Today, these systems are interconnected with large organisation-wide “systems of systems”, which is a very complicated environment where the systems are dependent on each other in many different ways.
Mathias Ekstedt’s research is about constructing models and analysing the properties of these complex systems of systems, especially their security. How does one know, for example, that the IT systems that control and monitor our society’s critical infrastructure, such as electricity and water supplies, can adequately withstand an IT attack? And how can security be improved in existing systems as effectively as possible? To be able to answer this, we need to understand and analyse the entire organisation-wide system and its vulnerabilities with a uniform approach.
The objective of the research is to develop practical decision support for cost-effective and secure system development and management in business and public operations.