Towards Actionable Mission Impact Assessment in the Context of Cloud Computing

Today’s cyber-attacks towards enterprise networks often un­ dermine and even fail the mission assurance of victim net­ works. Mission cyber resilience (or active cyber defense) is critical to prevent or minimize negative consequences to­ wards missions. Without effective mission impact assess­ ment, mission cyber resilience cannot be really achieved. However, there is an overlooked gap between mission im­ pact assessment and cyber resilience due to the non-mission­ centric nature of current research. This gap is even widened in the context of cloud computing. The gap essentially ac­ counts for the weakest link between missions and attackresilient systems, and also explains why the existing impact analysis is not really actionable. This paper initiates ef­ forts to bridge this gap, by developing a novel graphical model that interconnects the mission dependency graphs and cloud-level attack graphs. Our case study shows that the new cloud-applicable model is able to bridge the gap be­ tween mission impact assessment and cyber resilience. As a result, it can significantly boost the cyber resilience of mis­ sion critical systems.