Cyber Situational Awareness Service and Software Development Kit (CSASS)

Cyber warfare tactics can covertly turn our forces’ technological strength into an operational weakness. While much of the attention in both the military and commercial cyber security communities is on abrupt and blunt attacks on the network, the most insidious cyber threat to our forces are subtle and persistent attacks leading to compromised databases, processing algorithms, and displays. All warfighters must be given a tool to identify these subtle cyber attacks, to understand the effects these attack may have on decision-making, and to continue the fight in spite of such an attack. To address these needs, we propose to design and demonstrate a Cyber Situational Awareness Service and Software Development Kit (CSASS) that monitors, assesses, and communicates enterprise health information to support real-time warfighter decision-making. To accomplish this, we will identify a scenario to perform a work-centered evaluation of the implication of enterprise health on warfighter situational awareness and establish a supporting domain ontology. Also, we will design a monitoring engine built on stream processing technology which will listen for system interactions to feed a networked intelligent agent architecture that will provide continuous, real-time assessment of unfolding complex cyber behaviors to the warfighter.