One of the most significant challenges in cybersecurity is that humans are involved in software engineering and inevitably make security mistakes in their implementation of specifications, leading to software vulnerabilities. A challenge to eliminating these mistakes is the relative lack of empirical evidence regarding what secure coding practices (e.g., secure defaults, validating client data, etc.), threat modeling, and educational solutions are effective in reducing the number of application-level vulnerabilities that software engineers produce.

Evaluating the cybersecurity of a complex Industrial Control Systems (ICS), such as the Railway Transportation System (RTS), against a variety of cyber threats is a significantly hard and multi-faceted problem.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are engineered systems created as networks of interacting physical and computational processes. Most modern products in major industrial sectors, such as automotive, avionics, medical devices, and power systems already are or rapidly becoming CPS driven by new requirements and competitive pressures.