Human-Centric Training and Assessment System for Cyber Situational Awareness

The goal of the proposed work is to develop a human-centric training and assessment system for cyber situation awareness. The envisioned system will enable instructors to define training goals, design lesson plans, assign students roles in teams, and observe students performance, record events and interactions for scoring. The instructor/students can place tags (time or event) to roll back or replay an exercise. The proposed solution uses the Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) framework which facilitates scalable, programmable and realistic training and assessment for cyber situation awareness. An LVC framework provides a real-time, hardware-in-the-loop capability for simulation of cyber threats to the entire infrastructure where the impacts of cyber attacks can be tested on actual systems. This framework will leverage techniques in cognitive task analysis and assessment, network (protocol) modeling, attack models, attack graph visualization, and human-computer interaction to build a training system. For this work, Scalable Network will collaborate with the University of Delaware to form a strong partnership and leverage an NSF funded Regional Cyber-security Education Initiative project at the University. The developed simulation and analysis models will be used as a tool for training cyber analysts.