Fundamentally, digital safe-guard ecosystems have a
heterogeneous architecture, which means that ecosystems
consist of a diverse range of different components or participants.
Moreover, a high degree in inter-operability between
safe-guard subsystems has to be established. An extract
of the worldwide safe-guard ecosystem is shown in
Fig. 1. In each country or more general in each continent
interconnection between security agencies, police and border
control exists. These subsystems will be connected to
the worldwide safe-guard ecosystem, which have to be secured
via an embedded solution.
Vulnerability refers to a weakness in a digital ecosystem
allowing attackers to violate the integrity, confidentiality,
access control, availability or consistency. Vulnerabilities
may result mainly from bugs or other software defects in
this digital ecosystem. Vulnerabilities are of significant interest
when the program containing the vulnerability operates
with special privileges, performs authentication or provides
easy access to user data or facilities. Such attacks can
be initiated by buffer overflow conditions or index-out-ofbounds
accesses. In addition code injection or intrusion into
the safe-guard ecosystem can happen and denial of service
attacks can be treated.