Assessing Mission Impact of Cyberattacks: Report of the NATO IST-128 Workshop

Abstract

This report presents the results of a workshop conducted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2015 to explore science and technology for characterizing the impact of cyber-attacks on missions. Military mission success is highly dependent on the communications and information systems (CISs) that support the mission and their use in the cyber battlespace. The inexorably growing dependency on computational information processing for weapons, intelligence, communication, and logistics systems continues to increase the vulnerability of missions to various cyber threats. Attacks on CISs or other cyber incidents degrade or disrupt the usage of CISs, and the resulting mission capability, performance, and completion. These incidents are expected to increase in frequency and sophistication. The workshop participants concluded that the key to solving the mission impact assessment problem was in adopting and developing a new model-driven paradigm that creates and validates mechanisms of modeling the mission organization, the mission(s), and the cyber-vulnerable systems that support the mission(s). Such models then simulate or portray the impacts of the cyber-attacks. In addition, such model-based analysis could explore multiple alternative mitigation and work-around strategies--an essential part of coping with mission impact--and select the optimal course of mitigating actions. Only such a paradigm can be expected to provide meaningful, actionable information about mission impacts that have not been seen before or do not match prior experiences and patterns. The papers presented at this workshop are presented in an accompanying volume, Proceedings of the NATO Workshop IST-128, Assessing Mission Impact of Cyber Attacks.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2015
Accession Number
AD1000621

Entities

People

  • Alexander S. Kott
  • Alfred Moller
  • Cristian Vidu
  • Mona Lange
  • Nazife Baykal
  • Nikolai Stoianov
  • Pram Jain
  • Reginald Sawilla

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Control Systems
  • Cyber Defense Techniques
  • Cyber Threats
  • Cyberattacks
  • Cybersecurity
  • Cyberspace Operations
  • Electronic Mail
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Information Systems
  • Information Warfare
  • Internet Of Things
  • Nato
  • Risk Analysis
  • Situational Awareness
  • Systems Engineering
  • Vulnerability

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Academic Conference Management
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Cybersecurity.

Technology Areas

  • Cyber