Cyber Asset-to-Mission Mapping Model for Impact Assessment

The Secure Decisions division of Applied Visions, Inc. proposes to fill a technology gap by placing cyber attacks within their mission context, providing much-needed Situational Awareness (SA) about the people, assets, and branches of an organization that are affected. We will enhance Computer Network Defense (CND) SA by developing and testing a Cyber Asset-to-Mission Mapping Model (CAM3) system that automatically links cyber assets to potential dependent missions, other assets, users, and other related entities to enable CND analysts to perform accurate and efficient Impact Assessment. This effort will result in an ontology-based framework for modeling dependencies and a service-oriented infrastructure for populating and querying concrete instantiations of that framework. CAM3 will extract data from existing data sources through lightweight software services and fuse that data into an ontology, providing a formal description of the concepts and relationships that represent the knowledge created by the data fusion. We will provide a user interface for enhancing SA and a software interface to provide security and network management systems with contextual knowledge related to asset dependencies and mission. The system will be demonstrated to operational users. We will also develop a roadmap for transitioning the technology into DOD and commercial operations.