Automated Adversarial Course of Action Model Generation and Reasoning for Satellite Protection (commercial/military)

The United States has expended tremendous amounts of time and effort in maintaining the capability of our most critical space assets with a high degree of fidelity despite a wide range of possible occurrences. For the most part, however, the current threat model is largely natural. It has become increasingly important to improve our asset protection methodologies against malicious, intentional acts. These acts may be kinetic, cyber, or a combination, and may be timed to coincide with naturally occurring events that reduce our asset resiliency temporarily. We propose to design, develop, and deliver a ground breaking tool that will significantly aide analyst work in predicting and combating such threats. The Space Assessment Simulator (SAS) will include complex models of relevant naturally occurring events, as well as models of potential adversary resources including both kinetic and cyber capabilities. SAS will apply powerful game-theoretic algorithms to deduce a wide range of possible threats, ranging from most likely to most dangerous. It will include a sophisticated timing model to capture possibilities of adversaries launching attacks coordinated with natural events to disguise or confuse interpretation of their actions. These threat trees will be passed to the analysts for use in developing appropriate countermeasures. BENEFIT: The Space Assessment Simulator contains a library of possible actions, goals, and domains that are potentially applicable to either the defender of the space assets, or an adversary. Player models are then developed that contain a subset of these moves available to each player. Potential interactive natural events are also stored. The Space Assessment Engine can then examine millions of possibilities, and output rank ordered threats.