MeerCAT Overview
Mission-critical computing assets need to be tracked, managed, positioned, and secured with the same commitment afforded human resources and critical equipment. Decision-makers responsible for achieving organizational missions typically know where their key non-computing resources are, what tasks and functions those resources support, The goal of the MeerCAT project is to provide decision-makers with this information through a unified, big-picture view of the status of their cyber assets and the impact of that status on mission, whether they are vulnerable to malicious or non-malicious failures, and even with whom they have recently come in contact. They need to extend this awareness to fixed and mobile cyber assets such as computing hardware, software applications, databases, and electronically-supplied information. Such awareness will support the impact assessment of losing a cyber asset, and the positioning of other assets for continuity of operations.
MeerCAT: Critical Elements
The goal of the MeerCAT project is to provide decision-makers with this information through a unified, big-picture view of the status of their cyber assets and the impact of that status on mission.
These critical elements include:
- Location: Knowing just where cyber assets are in physical space and their logical location in a network topology is needed to understand the physical vulnerability of systems, geographic constraints to securing and maintaining systems, progress in deploying field-mobile systems, and much more. The widespread use of wireless cyber assets makes this more complex as these assets move, and pop on and off networks.
- Security: Vulnerabilities and security status of each critical cyber asset relative to unauthorized access, attacks on data integrity, and unavailability are key to assessing mission-readiness. This element is compounded in today’s wireless world. Wireless assets permit mobility, but also introduce new classes of vulnerabilities.
- Communication Patterns: Depicting social networks between network nodes to see how and where each node exchanges data may lead to further understanding or clarification of the device’s mission. Again, mobile assets make this assessment more complex, as they enter and leave networks.
- Mission: Decision-makers need an easy-to-understand representation of what roles the cyber assets play, when they are required to do so, and what might be the impact of their loss.
Creating a visualization system that integrates each of these elements into a unified framework to improve situational awareness – both on and off the battlefield – is the focus of this project.
