Automating information assurance for cyber situational awareness within a smart cloud system of systems

• Main Author: Teo, Kuan Wei Edmund
• Other Authors: Goshorn, Deborah E.
• Published: Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School 2014
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/41451

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. === In a world in which data is being generated in increasing large volumes and is easily accessible to multiple users in a cloud environment, there is a need to maintain situational awareness and information assurance of the data, ensuring the data is being monitored for vulnerabilities. This is especially crucial for military operations where the information being used to support the mission is confidential and readily available throughout the mission. It is essential to maintain the integrity of that information. The need is even more critical when data is being used to help save lives in natural disaster situations. A trio system concept within an enterprise/cloud network is developed in this research to provide situational awareness and command and control abilities to users, for detecting possible cyber attacks on network and computing resources, and maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical data within the network. A systems engineering approach was used to develop and propose the solution to ensure information assurance and cyber situational awareness within a smart cloud of system of systems. This thesis provides system diagrams of the proposed architecture focusing on one of the systems using IDEF0 diagrams, and a feature matrix to demonstrate the concept of Detect, Identify, Predict, and React model. A proof-of-concept experiment for the Identify model is discussed.