Mission-centricity in cyber security: Architecting cyber attack resilient missions

Abstract

Until recently the information technology (IT)-centricity was the prevailing paradigm in cyber security that was organized around confidentiality, integrity and availability of IT assets. Despite of its widespread usage, the weakness of IT-centric cyber security became increasingly obvious with the deployment of very large IT infrastructures and introduction of highly mobile tactical missions where the IT-centric cyber security was not able to take into account the dynamics of time and space bound behavior of missions and changes in their operational context. In this paper we will show that the move from IT-centricity towards to the notion of cyber attack resilient missions opens new opportunities in achieving the completion of mission goals even if the IT assets and services that are supporting the missions are under cyber attacks. The paper discusses several fundamental architectural principles of achieving cyber attack resilience of missions, including mission-centricity, survivability through adaptation, synergistic mission C2 and mission cyber security management, and the real-time temporal execution of the mission tasks. In order to achieve the overall system resilience and survivability under a cyber attack, both, the missions and the IT infrastructure are considered as two interacting adaptable multi-agent systems. While the paper is mostly concerned with the architectural principles of achieving cyber attack resilient missions, several models and algorithms that support resilience of missions are discussed in fairly detailed manner.