Mission Impact of Cyber Events: Scenarios and Ontology to Express the Relationships between Cyber Assets, Missions, and Users

Abstract

Awareness of the dependencies between cyber assets, missions and users is critical to assessing the mission impact of cyber attacks and maintaining continuity of business operations. However, there is no systematic method for defining the complex mapping between cyber assets (hardware, software, data), missions and users. This paper reports the results of an interdisciplinary workshop on how to map relationships between cyber assets and the users, missions, business processes and other entities that depend on those assets. The workshop yielded information about types of impact assessment beyond mission and financial analyses; scenarios illustrating the complex relationships between assets, mission and users; and models for expressing those relationships. The results will be used to develop a system that will automatically populate an ontology from commonly available network data and allow computer network defense, information technology and disaster recovery practitioners to query the system for information about the impact of the loss or degradation a cyber asset.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA517410

Entities

People

  • Anita D'amico
  • John Goodall
  • Laurin Buchanan
  • Paul Walczak

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Application Protocols
  • Application Software
  • Commerce
  • Computer Networks
  • Computers
  • Cyberattacks
  • Data Centers
  • Digital Information
  • Electronic Mail
  • Information Operations
  • Information Systems
  • Information Warfare
  • Network Architecture
  • Networks
  • Ontologies
  • Situational Awareness

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Science.
  • Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Cyberspace Operations against Adversarial Threats.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Cyber