Towards Cooperative Autonomous Resilient Defenses in Cyberspace

Cyberspace is becoming the nervous system of our modern society as it is increasingly being integrated in virtually all aspects of control and communications. From worldwide social interactions and gaming to smart infrastructure systems in energy, healthcare, transportation, and emergency response, all are enabled and advanced by operations within cyberspace. Today’s cyberspace comprises highly dynamic, interdependent global network of information technology infrastructures, telecommunications networks, computing systems, integrated sensors, control systems, and embedded processors and controllers impacting all aspects of our lives.

In this seminar, we will present an overview of our CyberCARD program that aims at developing a framework and toolset for security and trust of cyberspace-enabled systems that are highly complex and typically identified by uncertainty and emergent structures and behaviors. These complex cyberspace-enabled systems are characterized by many factors including their extreme scales and data rates, their highly dynamic environmental and system contexts, and their complex integrations of cyber and physical controls and resources. Consequently, cyberspace defense is of paramount importance as events in cyberspace may have extremely significant impacts on system operations. CyberCARD aims to address the fundamental challenges in the following four interrelated science and engineering tracks:

• Trustworthy cyber-physical systems and infrastructures: to provide robust control and communications
• Pervasive monitoring and analytics: to provide self-awareness and situational-awareness, particularly in real time
• Attack-resilient system operation: to provide continuous services even under persistent attacks
• Cooperative autonomous cyberspace defense: to enable systems to work together cooperatively with shared defenses and understanding

We will then present our Concern-Oriented Reference Model (CORM) for future networks as a foundation CyberCARD component.