Cyberspace is becoming the nervous system of our modern society as it is increasingly being integrated in virtually all aspects of control and communications. From worldwide social interactions and gaming to smart infrastructure systems in healthcare, energy, transportation, and emergency response, all are enabled and advanced by operations within cyberspace. Today's cyberspace comprises highly dynamic, interdependent global network of information technology infrastructures, telecommunications networks, computing systems, integrated sensors, control systems, and embedded processors and controllers impacting all aspects of our lives.
The CyberCARD workshop focuses on exploring and developing a research agenda for security and trust of cyberspace-enabled systems that are highly complex and typically identified by uncertainty and emergent structures and behaviors. These complex cyberspace-enabled systems are characterized by many factors including their extreme scales and data rates, their highly dynamic environmental and system contexts, and their complex integrations of cyber and physical controls and resources. Consequently, cyberspace defense is of paramount importance as events in cyberspace may have extremely significant impacts on system operations. Given the scale, complexity, and sensitivity of the targeted systems and their historical reliance on untrustworthy components, cyberspace defense becomes an extremely difficult endeavor requiring a multi-disciplinary research agenda. A primary goal of CyberCARD activities is to foster strategic partnerships among government, industry, and academia in these regards.
The technical objectives of the workshop are to explore the fundamental science and technology to create cyberspace defenses that would enable large-scale systems and infrastructures to:
- Provide robust control and communications
- Be self-aware and situational-aware in real time
- Provide continuous services even under persistent attacks and failures
- Work together cooperatively with shared defenses and understanding
Consequently, there is a need for basic and applied research to:
- Generate cyberspace defense system models, designs and architectural frameworks based on scientific paradigms ensuring availability, performance, survivability and security for the purpose of bottleneck identification and optimization
- Create the building blocks and architecture for cyberspace defenses that satisfy the above objectives
- Create validated models and technology to quantify the amount of confidence provided by proposed approaches
The workshop will focus on fundamental scientific challenges that must be resolved in the following four interrelated science and engineering tracks:
- Trustworthy cyber-physical systems and infrastructures: to provide robust control and communications
- Pervasive monitoring and analytics: to provide self-awareness and situational-awareness, particularly in real time
- Attack-resilient system operation: to provide continuous services even under persistent attacks
- Cooperative autonomous cyberspace defense: to enable systems to work together cooperatively with shared defenses and understanding
The workshop is interested in developing a research agenda covering structural, functional and behavioral aspects of CyberCARD. Explicit and pervasive approaches that address concerns in application, communication, and resource are of particular emphasis. For each of the tracks, the workshop will seek to identify technical gaps and opportunities for transformative research, tangible benefits to end users, critical technical barriers, basis of confidence in the results, and nature and description of end results to be delivered. Some key challenges in the thrust areas include, but are not limited to:
Track I: Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems and Infrastructures (CPSI)
Track II: Pervasive Monitoring and Analytics
Track III: Attack-Resilient System Operation
Track IV: Cooperative Autonomous Cyberspace Defense
