Software design decision vulnerability analysis

Software is a key part of today´s increasingly complex safety systems. There are many techniques that are available to identify system hazards and hazardous software behaviour. An identified gap in these techniques is the analysis of decisions performed during design and development that can potentially increase the risk to safety of the system due to vulnerabilities introduced by the chosen solution. In this paper we propose a method to record and justify design decisions, identify the vulnerabilities of each design decision and recommend further targeted analysis and mitigation to control those vulnerabilities.