Current trends of cyber attacks need the design of more and more secure systems. As such systems can be developed with classical elements like cryptography or trusted execution environments, there might be other ways of doing that. From an architecture point of view, for each individual design decision, it can be assessed if the decision increases or decreases the attack surface of the system.
It would however be much better if the attack surface could be somehow measured or calculated, like enumerating the somehow the possibility of the highly dangerous attacks, the average attacks and the non-critical attacks. Such a measure would provide a way to explicitly redesign systems in a way that attack surface would be smaller in a measurable way.
