The vision of the SSE group is to develop disruptive research on different facets of software and systems engineering, with particular focus on dependability and security aspects. Internationally recognized contributions of SSE include new experimental approaches for dependability, resilience and security evaluation and benchmarking, including fault injection, robustness testing, vulnerability & attack injection and vulnerability detection methods. These techniques and tools have been researched for a variety of domains, ranging from web applications and services to safety critical systems, and have resulted from a long series of EU projects, having CECRIS (ended 2016) and DEVASSES (ended 2017) as the most recent ones. In the last few years, SSE research focus has moved to dependability and security evaluation in cloud infrastructures and services, particularly through H2020 projects such as EUBrasilCloudFORUM and EUBra-BIGSEA.

SSE has established the “standard de facto” for the two main fault injection techniques types: Xception for HW fault injection and G-SWFIT for SW fault injection. These two techniques have been widely used by the research community, and commercial tools and services based on these two approaches are being marketed by Critical Software (Portugal) and Critiware (Italy), including space agencies such as NASA and ESA, and companies such as Huawei in their customer portfolio.

In addition to the traditional focus on dependability/security evaluation and benchmarking, the Group has been also quite active on a variety of topics of Software and Systems Engineering, including component based software development issues, namely experimental risk assessment and component reutilization techniques, failure and exception prediction, concurrent programming models, management of heterogeneous parallel and distributed environments with emphasis on performance, quality of service and power consumption, and cryptographic hash function research (e.g., BLAKE2).