Effective Cyber Situation Awareness (CSA) Assessment and Training

The recent increase in cyber attacks against United States critical assets has greatly expanded the need for effective cyber defenses. Human cyber analysts are an essential element in these efforts. Information overload and a concomitant lack of comprehensive cyber situation awareness are common problems that hamper the effectiveness of analysis. Systems that can carry out human-in-the-loop simulation of the cyber analysis task will lead to new capabilities in assessing the effectiveness of analysts and the support tools they use and will help enhance individual and team performance. This Phase I STTR effort showed the feasibility of a new capability for assessing cyber team effectiveness, cyber support tools, cyber training regimes, and the integration of multiple-component systems with human operators. We developed a novel test-bed that provides a simulation environment for the cyber analysis task and that is equipped with measures of individual, team, and system effectiveness that allows for the assessment of cyber support tools and visualizations, cyber training regimes, and cyber concepts of operation. The effectiveness metrics embedded within the test-bed provide real and meaningful measurement of analyst performance, will aid in selecting support tools, and can be used to optimize the use of human capital through. Additionally, the test-bed can be used to evaluate and improve training protocols.