Assuring mission assurance in a tactical-cyber environment

Mission assurance is the justified confidence from a system customer and user that the system will function as intended without exploitable vulnerabilities. For military communications and sensor systems "intended function" includes key attributes that the system and its information are available when needed and can be trusted to be accurate and secure. Exploitable vulnerabilities can be due to cyber attacks, implementation flaws, or inherent system weaknesses. This paper describes a system engineering approach to quantify the level of mission assurance expected in a real-world environment, including diverse considerations such as: cyber-attack, user errors, component failures, logistic delays and weather outages. The resulting mission assurance metric supports system optimization and customer assurance of system robustness.