Handling temporal and functional changes for mission impact assessment

Abstract

Mission impact assessment for computer networks has become increasingly important as the prevalent cyber assets support more and more mission critical infrastructure for daily operations as well as emergency responses. Existing work lacks comprehensive and systematic treatment and thus may not be able to provide timely assessment. Evolving from a general graphical representation of cyber assets, this work develops a Mission Tree model that adapts to both functional and temporal changes. The proposed approach will be shown to support the estimate of current impact as well as predict future impact based on an efficient upward propagation through the assets and aggregation functions that reflect how assets functionally support different tasks and missions.