Terminological Collapse in Chinese Context and Its Engineering Pollution Chain: A Review of Safety-Security Integration Methodology for Railway Signaling Systems
To dissect the full-chain transmission mechanism by which the unified Chinese rendering of Safety (functional safety) and Security (cybersecurity) as “safety” obscures their methodological divergence in railway signaling, and to furnish a unified terminological baseline and methodological framework for Safety-Security Integration. A combination of standards-document analysis, regulatory comparison and full-lifecycle method mapping was adopted. Taking the EN 50126/50716/50129 family and the IEC 62443 family as benchmarks, a comparative framework was constructed across threat models, architectural design, standards systems and lifecycle, and the institutional impact of the semantic collapse was examined in conjunction with domestic regulations, official terminology and engineering management practice. The semantic collapse induces a transmission chain of conceptual division, standard fragmentation, engineering conflict and lifecycle disconnection. A well-developed national standards system prevails on the Safety side whereas dedicated Security standards for proprietary railway control protocols remain absent; Safety’s preference for deterministic exhaustive analysis and static redundancy conflicts directly with Security’s dynamic adversarial defence, leaving signal systems unprotected during online operation; the two disciplines are deeply isomorphic in architecture principles such as defence in depth, integrity verification and controlled degradation. This is a methodology-oriented review; quantitative empirical validation on specific engineering projects was not conducted owing to limited access to public data and the need to exclude confidential engineering information. Safety and Security are unified under the “Assurance” meta-concept, being merely its projections along two threat dimensions—unintentional random failure and deliberate malicious attack. Breaking the pollution chain requires simultaneous advances in project initiation, bidding technical specifications and lifecycle-wide co-assurance, making Safety-Security Integration an inevitable direction for both standardization and engineering practice.
