TEWI Colloquium
Dr. Mattia Salnitri | University of Klagenfurt | University of Bergamo
Monday, June 16, 2025 at 05 p.m. @ S.2.05, University of Klagenfurt
Abstract Socio-technical systems are pervasive, comprising human, organisational and technical components that interact with each other to achieve common objectives. Examples of socio-technical systems are smart cities, airports, and hospitals. Each of these systems manages a large number of assets, such as the data that is stored and shared and the infrastructure itself. Security issues in socio-technical systems might lead to severe consequences: a security issue in a hospital might compromise the health of people, or a security issue in an airport might threaten the lives of passengers and staff. My research work consists of creating methods that support the engineering of secure socio-technical systems to prevent, detect and mitigate security issues. Given the intrinsic heterogeneity of the components involved, a mere technical solution is frequently not enough, while methods that consider technical, social and organisational perspectives are considered more effective. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of such holistic methods that I have designed and validated. The methods allow the engineering of secure socio-technical systems, connecting and facilitating the design of aspects such as the objectives of actors, their procedural execution and implementation. On the technical side, I will present a method for the enforcement of security requirements using technologies such as blockchain. On the organisational and social side, I will present a method that strengthens what has been considered the weak link of the security chain, i.e., the people and their (un)secure behaviours.
Bio: Mattia Salnitri is an Associate Professor at the Management Information and Production Engineering department of the University of Bergamo (IT) and a Visiting researcher at the Engineering and Social Informatics Research Group of the University of Bournemouth (UK). Before that, he was an assistant professor at the Department of Electronic, Computer Science and Biotechnology (DEIB) of the Politecnico di Milano (IT), and a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Trento at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), where he also earned his Ph.D. in 2016. Mattia’s main research interest is the design of secure socio-technical systems. He investigated various aspects of this research field, including security requirements elicitation and definition, security requirements enforcement, secure business process definition, verification of procedural constraints, and generation of secure code.
