Extending situation modeling with inference of plausible future cyber situations

Cyber attacks committed against networks and software assets (operating systems, applications, and data repositories) have profound impact both on ongoing and future missions that use IT services offered by the networks. The attacks by exploiting the vulnerabilities of the software assets can push their impact through the cyber terrain - the cyber dependency network of structural, spatial, functional and other domain-specific dependencies that exist among the software assets and services, and reach the missions. In this paper we will describe a novel approach of inferring plausible future cyber security situations. We will describe the basic models and algorithms of the approach including, fuzzy temporal situations, the principle of plausible future situations, cyber terrain and impact dependency graph.