Overview of Cyber Situation Awareness
Improving a decision maker’s1 situational awareness of the cyber domain isn’t greatly different than enabling situation awareness in more traditional domains2. Situation awareness necessitates working with processes capable of identifying domain specific activities as well as processes capable of identifying activities that cross domains. These processes depend on the context of the environment, the domains, and the goals and interests of the decision maker but they can be defined to support any domain. This chapter will define situation awareness in its broadest sense, describe our situation awareness reference and process models, describe some of the applicable processes, and identify a set of metrics usable for measuring the performance of a capability supporting situation awareness. These techniques are independent of domain but this chapter will also describe how they apply to the cyber domain.
KeywordsDecision Maker Current Situation Situation Awareness Information Fusion Cost Utility
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The authors thank Mr. Mike Hinman, AFRL/RIEA; Dr. Moises Sudit and Dr. Adam Stotz, University of Buffalo; Dr. Shanchieh ‘Jay’ Yang, Rochester Institute of Technology; Mr. Jared Holsopple, Rochester Institute of Technology; and countless others for their valuable insights and contributions to this research. This chapter is approved for public release, case number 88ABW-2009-1866.
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