Dr Gabriel Jakobson

Dr Gabriel Jakobson is the Chief Scientist of Altusys Corp., a consulting firm specializing in situation management technologies for defense and cyber security applications. Dr Jakobson is vice-chair of the Tactical Communications and Operations Technical Committee of IEEE ComSoc, chair of the IEEE ComSoc Sub-Committee on Situation Management, member of IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in Complex Information Systems, and Distinguished IEEE Lecturer. Dr Jakobson holds Honorary Degree of Doctor Honorius Causa from Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and is General Chair of the Conference on Cognitive Methods of Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA 2011-2013. He received PhD degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Cybernetics, Estonia.

Mission-Centricity in Cyber Security: Architecting Cyber Attack Resilient Missions
Until recently the IT-centricity was the prevailing paradigm in cyber security. It was organized around achieving three main goals: achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability of IT assets and services. Despite of its widespread usage, the weakness of IT-centric cyber security became increasingly obvious with the emergence of several new factors, including the deployment of very large IT infrastructures, where it was economically unjustifiable to seek absolute protection for all IT components, and introduction of highly mobile tactical missions, Initial changes in the cyber security paradigm were associated with the introduction of the notion of mission critical assets, and later with the specification of the principles of network-centricity in cyber security.  The concepts of mission critical assets and net-centricity were important steps in orienting IT security measures towards the real needs of mission security, however in both cases the missions were considered as static entities that at best were used for parameterization of the IT-centric cyber security models.

In this presentation we are introducing the notion of cyber attack resilient missions as an example of mission-centric cyber security systems. We will show that mission cyber attack resilience is achieved through emergent (collective and adaptive) behavior of IT infrastructure components and missions. The presentation discusses several critical architectural principles of achieving cyber attack resilience and survivability of missions, including mission-centricity, survivability through adaptation, synergistic mission command & control and mission cyber security management, and the real-time temporal execution of the mission tasks. In order to achieve the overall system resilience and survivability under a cyber attack, both, the command an control of missions in the phusical space, and management of IT infrastructure components in s cyber cpace are considered as two interacting adaptable multi-agent systems.