  This report presents the results of a workshop conducted by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel
in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2015 to explore science and technology for
characterizing the impact of cyber-attacks on missions. Military mission
success is highly dependent on the communications and information systems
(CISs) that support the mission and their use in the cyber battlespace. The
inexorably growing dependency on computational information processing for
weapons, intelligence, communication, and logistics systems continues to
increase the vulnerability of missions to various cyber threats. Attacks on
CISs or other cyber incidents degrade or disrupt the usage of CISs, and the
resulting mission capability, performance, and completion. These incidents are
expected to increase in frequency and sophistication. The workshop participants
concluded that the key to solving the mission impact assessment problem was in
adopting and developing a new model-driven paradigm that creates and validates
mechanisms of modeling the mission organization, the mission(s), and the
cyber-vulnerable systems that support the mission(s). Such models then simulate
or portray the impacts of the cyber-attacks. In addition, such model-based
analysis could explore multiple alternative mitigation and work-around
strategies - an essential part of coping with mission impact - and select the
optimal course of mitigating actions. Only such a paradigm can be expected to
provide meaningful, actionable information about mission impacts that have not
been seen before or do not match prior experiences and patterns. The papers
presented at this workshop are available in an accompanying volume, Proceedings
of the NATO Workshop IST-128, Assessing Mission Impact of Cyber Attacks.

Cryptography and Security