LTC Paul Walczak Program Manager, Information Assurance, US Army Research Lab, 2800 Powder Mill Rd, Adelphi, MD 20783-1197, 301.394.3862, FAX 301.394.3591

The roles of information and information technology have risen to the forefront in the discussion of military force development as America prepares for the next era of warfare. The Army XXI Division (the organizational building block of the 21st century Army) is focused on massing the effects of all the warfighting capabilities available to land forces. Information operations doctrine enables the massing of effects through precision maneuver and engagement by using information technology to focus weapons on situationally relevant centers of gravity. In this digitized environment, the land forces of the future will be reliant upon information systems to control the pace and lethality at which we pursue objectives, dominating over our adversaries' ability to see and understand the battlefield. To achieve information superiority, our systems will link with others in the global information environment, as well as those of our allies and coalition partners, thereby increasing the risks to security. The aggregate effect is greater reliance on information as a warfighting resource, accompanied by increased risk in operational security, adding a new measure of importance to the military notion of survivability.

Information survivability (INFOSURV) has become a pertinent topic within many private sector and government organizations, and is an active area of interest within the research community. INFOSURV is more than security, more than safety, and more than fault tolerance. It is a combination of quality attributes that assures that even if significant portions of a system are damaged by an attack, accident, or failure, the mission of the network, software, or service will continue. The systems that are the principal foci of concern are highly distributed networked systems that support tactical and national infrastructures and their critical applications.

ARL is investigating the evolving discipline of survivable information systems engineering with hopes that information systems can be designed to consistently provide mission functionality in a hostile environment. This hostile environment includes conditions that threaten the institutional base apparatus in the continental U.S. that plans, administers and supports distant combat operations as well as the tactical battlefield itself. In this instant, information assurance becomes a dimension of warfare, part of an overarching concept known as information dominance. Our assessment of the challenges to information assurance within the land warfare environment reveals these characteristic trends:

Integration practices toward achieving composed information architectures that often render requirements and functional capabilities as "fixes" instead of having them conceived as design objectives.

An over-relying assumption that open standards and commercial products driven purely by market forces will meet information assurance requirements for the land force of the future. This is especially acute in the area of mobile, tactical wireless communications.

Silver-bulleting: attempting to satisfy highly visible vulnerabilities with point solutions that promise to provide some immediate measure of success without adequate interpretation of the root causes of the problem.

Lack of attention to the behavioral dynamic which individuals and organizations experience in the process of integrating, configuring and operating critical information systems technology (with respect to the core mission of the entity) .

A general shortfall in applied engineering skills and ability to think at the systems level in our experiences with recent graduates of some of America's most reputable scientific and engineering programs.

Primitive interpretation of "weakest link" theory within the context of complex network systems (don't yet know how to develop highly survivable networks given the presence of untrustworthy subsystems, components, and administrative practices).

To achieve an acceptable level of assurance, information systems must possess properties of survivability: resistance to risks whose consequences, if manifested, would prohibit mission functionality. We are investigating technologies that improve survivability through: active monitoring and reactive response; planned redundancies and bypass circuits for transparent continuity; and through homeostatic tradeoff between system attributes to deliver situationally acceptable functionality. ARL is applying a long term approach to survivability that will explore the holistic effect of inherent characteristics such as performance, reliability and security, amongst others that Dr. Neumann has suggested. To this end, ARL is investing in programs that seek to develop survivable information systems architectures and communications protocols. Another ARL initiative takes a lead in developing focused graduate level educational programs that promote the principles of survivable systems theory. Through these pursuits, ARL hopes to guide the evolution of systems engineering into a practical discipline that contributes survivable information systems technology for land warfare.

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