Critical Program Information Assessment Standardization Toolkit (CAST)

Program protection and security personnel in the DoD are faced with the complex task of identifying and protecting sensitive information about systems, including the nature of mission-critical functions and components, and Critical Program Information (CPI). Successful and efficient identification and protection of CPI is essential to maintaining US Warfighters’ technological advantage. Currently, guidance exists for the content and format of CPI, but not to help identify it in the first place. As a result, each individual must manually interpret general guidelines in the context of each program, often acting under incomplete or even conflicting information, leading to inconsistencies and gaps in horizontal protection across programs. Additionally, program protection specialists need to read and consult a large volume of program-related data from a variety of data sources, often from documents which differ widely in their intent. To address these challenges, we propose to design and demonstrate a CPI Assessment Standardization Toolkit (CAST). CAST is a customizable approach that uses Systemic Functional Grammars and data automation to interpret and parse program data. Taking in criteria that reflect user preferences and well-defined functional requirements, CAST visualizes and contextualizes the automation’s outputs and provides recommended CPI assessments in an easily understandable format.