Cyber-ARGUS - A mission assurance framework

Abstract

The use of cyberspace as a platform for military operations has been growing at impressive rates. Yet, it is still a relatively new area that poses considerable research challenges. Security techniques are not sufficiently effective to protect IT systems and most fail to address the correlation between actions and effects across multiple domains. In other words, identifying how actions performed in the cyber domain affect the mission goals is yet an unsolved problem. This research presents a potential solution and proposes a framework that links the cyber and the operations domains, evaluating how actions in the first impact the effectiveness of missions in the latter. The framework, Cyber-ARGUS, is a Command and Control (C2) support system comprised of a set of tools that provides coherent and consistent mapping between the two domains. Relevant information about the nodes of a cyber infrastructure supporting an operation is stored in a knowledge base, and then used to build a Bayesian Network that provides impact assessment. The technique is illustrated through the simulation of an air transportation scenario in which the C2 infrastructure is subjected to various cyber-attacks, and Cyber-ARGUS is used to assess their associated impact to the air operations. The main contribution of this research is the methodology that enables assessing the cyber impact to ongoing missions. One major advantage of the technique is that it achieves this by calculating the combined effects produced by the attackers and defenders plans, without the requirement of knowing the hard-to-assess enemy's individual actions.