Towards Net-Centric Cyber Survivability for Ballistic Missile Defense

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) is engaged in a mission to unify its software systems towards a “net-centric” vision— where commanders gain advantage by rapidly producing, consuming, and sharing information using service oriented architectures (SOAs). In this paper, we study the cyber survivability of mission-critical net-centric systems, focusing on Ballistic-Missile-Defense (BMD) systems. We propose a net-centric architecture for augmenting the survivability of critical DoD net-centric systems. Our architecture draws inspiration from several theories of warfare, focusing on the goal of giving cyber commanders “decision superiority.” Our architecture prescribes a net-centric decision-support system that implements the Cyber OODA loop (the cycle of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting within the cyber domain). We present an illustration-of-concept prototype implementation, and describe its role in a ballistic-missile exercise. We relate our experiences from this exercise and suggest future directions towards achieving net-centric cyber survivability.