Operation Assessment in cyberspace: Understanding the effects of Cyber Deception
Salvador Llopis Sánchez, David Lopes Antunes · 2024
Cyber planners face a considerable challenge in finding holistic solutions for a cyber defence decision-support system - a core module of a cyber situation awareness capability. Due to a fast-evolving cyberspace, decision-makers assisted by technical staff are prone to carry out qualitative assessments when planning and conducting cyber operations instead of exclusively relying on quantitative assessments to articulate cyber defence mechanisms. A hybrid setting combining both types of assessments would be key to having the ability to monitor progression, anticipate deviations from initial plans, and evaluate effectiveness towards mission accomplishment. In line with this rationale, the authors propose a thorough analysis and tailoring of the military operation assessment framework applied to the characteristics of the cyberspace in view of identifying a proper methodology able to regularly assess the situation and provide mitigation measures to fix goal alignment problems, including measuring effects of cyber deception. Feedback mechanisms can capture the outcomes of implemented decisions, analyse discrepancies from expected results, and inform iterative improvements in the decision-support system. Such goals are considered operational objectives and decisive conditions of the operation design. The results are expected to shed some light about measuring the required performance of action and effectiveness using mission impact analysis and risk calculations among others. It remains to be further investigated how machine learning models could be integrated into the proposed hybrid system.