Publications

This paper describes AMICA (Analyzing Mission Impacts of Cyber Actions), an integrated approach for understanding mission impacts of cyber attacks. AMICA combines process modeling, discrete-event simulation, graph-based dependency modeling, and dynamic visualizations. This is a novel convergence of two lines of research: process modeling/simulation and attack graphs. AMICA captures process flows for mission tasks as well as cyber attacker and defender tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Vulnerability dependency graphs map network attack paths, and mission-dependency graphs define the hierarchy of high-to-low-level mission requirements mapped to cyber assets. Through simulation of the resulting integrated model, we quantify impacts in terms of mission-based measures, for various mission and threat scenarios. Dynamic visualization of simulation runs provides deeper understanding of cyber warfare dynamics, for situational awareness in the context of simulated conflicts. We demonstrate our approach through a prototype tool that combines operational and systems views for rapid analysis.