The “Mission Aware” Concept for Design of Cyber‐Resilience

This chapter introduces the Mission Aware framework, which is a proactive, model‐based, and strategic approach to cybersecurity. Mission Aware is an outcome of work in the SERC's Trusted Systems research area with the aim of creating tools and methods to support engineering and testing of cyber‐resilient cyber‐physical systems. Mission Aware aims to provide a framework for designing systems that are resilient against cyberattacks. The framework focuses on the use of engineered mechanisms for detecting and responding to potential cyberattacks. During the early conceptual and requirements phases, patterns for these engineered mechanisms can be specified using model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) techniques and used as a basis for requirements, architecting, design, and provisioning for verification and validation activities. This approach is primarily applied in cyber‐physical systems, such as vehicles and weapons systems, rather than pure cyber and networking systems. Mission Aware is meant to be used in concert with the System Theoretic Processes Assessment (STPA) and variants from the safety community, as well as the Cyber Security Requirements Methodology (CSRM) and Framework for Operational Resilience in Engineering and System Test (FOREST) developed by SERC. Each of these companion methodologies are covered by a chapter in this cluster.