Did the Cyber Team Win?

Abstract

Cyber team performance in military conflict scenarios is very difficult to quantify due to its ambiguous nature. This
research effort aims to improve our understanding of how cyber teams affect the terrain they are charged with protecting,
and which other forces depend on. An agent-based modeling and simulation software called the Cyber Forces-Interactions-
Terrain (Cyber-FIT) framework is used to simulate realistic cyber team missions in contested cyberspace and then quantify
their performance from observable data sources. The software ingests configuration files to setup agent characteristics and
then, after simulation runs, outputs data files that are used for statistical analysis. Two virtual experiments are conducted in
this work. The first tests different team setups in terms of skill level against varying adversary complexity levels to
demonstrate the importance of human resourcing in the cyber forces. The second analyses deployment delay time to an
active conflict which depicts the efficacy of agent-based modeling of cyber assets for wargaming applications. All face
validated simulations are based on a combination of industry frameworks, survey data, and empirical data to give a
sufficiently realistic representation of cyber conflict. As military forces become ever more dependent on cyberspace to realize
effects and project power, the understanding of cyberspace as a terrain of war becomes more critical. This research takes
on the difficult task of defining and computationally modeling the abstract phenomenon that is cyberspace. This gives battle
commander and military leadership a better answer to: did the cyber team win?