Cybersecurity: Defending the New Battlefield.

摘要

Cybersecurity is one of the most important challenges for our military today. Cyberspace is a new warfighting domain, joining the traditional air, land, sea and space domains and cybersecurity considerations apply to almost all major defense acquisition programs. Weapon systems and information technologies operate in an increasingly complex, networked, joint information environment, within which the threat has demonstrated itself to be remarkably agile, capable and persistent. To ensure programs are adequately prepared to deploy capabilities and support operations in the contested cyber domain, developmental testers must have robust, continuously improving methodologies and infrastructure to test and evaluate (T&E) our network-enabled military capabilities. The Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Developmental Test and Evaluation (DASD DT&E) and Director, Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) has embarked on a course to improve the conduct of, and resources supporting, cybersecurity DT&E to set the conditions for improved production and deployment of enhanced capabilities to the warfighter. Dubbed Shift Left (see this author s article in the September October issue of Defense AT&L magazine), the initiative fundamentally is about earlier identification of design issues and potential failure modes through mission-focused testing in the four key areas of performance, reliability, interoperability and cybersecurity.