Main Subcommittee Category: Simulation

How would you label your submission?: Industry

Abstract:

In the modern battlespace, the traditional fight within the warfighting domains of air, land, sea, and space has expanded to the cyberspace domain. Within the cyberspace domain, adversaries actively pursue internet protocol (IP)-based cyber attacks to affect operational missions in all domains. Cyber Mission Force (CMF) teams direct, synchronize, and coordinate cyberspace operations in defense of U.S. national interests. Within the CMF, Cyber Protection Teams (CPT) defend critical infrastructure and key resources from threat actions, while Cyber Combat Mission Teams (CCMT) conduct military cyber operations in support of combatant commands. To maximize their effectiveness for multi-domain operations (MDO), these cyber teams require collective cyber-kinetic training to ensure they work effectively with commanders across the Services and Joint Force to accomplish their assigned missions and achieve information advantage in the battlespace.

Cyber-kinetic training is currently hindered because existing live, virtual, and constructive (LVC) systems used for command staff training are not developed to communicate directly with cyber ranges used for cyber team training. Coordination of cyber effects between these training environments is performed manually. This paper describes a novel system architecture developed to automate the communication of cyber effects between a cyber range and LVC systems. The system utilizes cyber range sensors for cyber battle damage assessment (BDA) due to operator actions within the range that cause changes to network and system states. This cyber BDA is communicated to the LVC training environment using the Cyber Simulation TRaining for Impacts to Kinetic Environment (CyberSTRIKE) architecture so that generated cyberspace effects have an operational impact on connected command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) interfaces. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated though a prototype that coordinates several cyberspace effects between the cyber range and LVC environment. This approach represents a significant improvement for cyber-kinetic training, increasing warfighter readiness for MDO missions.

Keywords: CYBER;INFORMATION OPERATIONS;TRAINING

Additional Keywords not in the list above: CYBER-KINETIC, CYBER EFFECTS

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Mark Evans