Quantitative Assessment of USAF Base Physical Security Risk due to Communications and Cyber Threats

A well-established concern among USAF Base Commanders is the lack of analysis available to make risk informed decisions about how to assess and mitigate the impacts of combined communications/cyber network and Base physical security attack. Future attacks against USAF Bases are likely to be more sophisticated then attacks of the past and will likely begin with an attack on comms/cyber assets followed by a physical attack. For instance, an adversary attack against a Base would begin by jamming the Base radio communications network or firing a missile into the building housing critical server equipment to create confusion and degrade command and control, followed by an armed sUAS or armed gate runner attack on flight line assets. Analyzing the impacts of these sophisticated combined attacks scenarios requires a combined comms/cyber and physical security assessment that uses knowledge graphs to capture the complexities of and magnitude of attack vectors in a comms/cyber network and uses a digital twin or 3-D model of the physical Base to run Monte-Carlo simulations of attack scenarios, identified by the knowledge graph, to quantify and visualize the impacts of comms/cyber-attacks on physical security response and mission readiness. Phase I will be used to establish the feasibility of using the AVERT Comms/Cyber solution to leverage the combination of a comms/cyber network knowledge graph together with the AVERT Physical Security modeling and simulation solution to quantitatively assess the impacts of comms/cyberattacks on physical security responses and mission readiness.  Specifically, this proposal is focused on the following R/R&D objectives: Evaluate the feasibility of capturing a base comms/cyber network in a knowledge graph. Evaluate how to identify the interdependencies between the comms/cyber network, physical security systems, and integrated base defense plan. Determine which of the combined comms/cyber and physical security attack scenarios have the biggest impact. In a knowledge graph there are 2N possible states. It is unlikely that every combination has a significant impact, whereas certain scenarios have a high impact. Determine how to capture and represent the quantitative assessment derived from modeling and running Monte-Carlo simulations of the high impact scenarios identified in the comms/cyber knowledge graph in a way that informs base Commander risk informed decision making about the impacts of a combined comms/cyber and physical security attack on physical security responses and mission readiness.