Cyber Situational Awareness and Mission-Centric Resilient Cyber Defense

The paper proposes a conceptual framework and a method for assessing impact that cyber attacks might have on cyber assets, services, and missions. It introduces a new method of cyber defense and emphasizes that there are two interacting processes which support the method collectively and adaptively. These two processes are cyber situational management in the cyberspace and mission situational management in the physical space. It discusses the framework and enabling technologies of these two processes that keep the mission continuing even if the network which supports the mission may be compromised by a cyber attack. And it also proposes an impact graph that clearly illustrates how a mission can be affected by a compromised software asset step by step.