A Cyber Warfare Prototype for Live, Virtual, & Constructive Simulations
(Room S320B)
29 Nov 17
9:00 AM
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9:30 AM
Cyber warfare has quickly moved to the forefront of the Army’s training needs. With the realization that cyberspace is now a warfighting domain, simulation and training program managers are left struggling to identify the best solution for implementing cyber warfare effects into the training domain. The term cyber itself can imply a broad range of possibilities including electronic warfare (e.g. jamming), kinetic warfare (e.g. destroying systems), hacking attacks, and insider threats. Current major training simulations among the Live, Virtual, Constructive, and Gaming (LVC&G) domains lack a cyber implementation, with the exception of a low fidelity cyber warfare effects simulation in the One Semi-Automated Forces (OneSAF) program. It is necessary to train in this warfighting domain, but the requirements and best strategies for conducting cyber training have created a challenging technical gap for the simulation and training communities. Presently, the Army’s Cyber Mission Force teams require cyber range training to provide the realistic data exchanges necessary to develop their skills. This type of training is commonly referred to as “cyber for cyber.” The rest of the Army falls into another category of cyber training commonly referred to as “cyber for others.” After talking with numerous stakeholders, we decided to develop a prototype system for training the “cyber for others” group to experience cyber-attacks on their tactical mission command systems and to make recovery decisions. This prototype, called Cyber Operations Battlefield Web Service (COBWebS), provides the capability to simulate the effects of various cyber-attacks on command and control communication between the synthetic entities and the Blue Force’s mission command systems. Our prototype leverages the OneSAF Mission Command Adapter Web Service (MCA-WS) and adds cyber warfare effects modeling. We will share our experience developing and field testing this cyber warfare training capability.