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 Notional Depiction
To achieve this goal we need to feed various, disparate data types into the visualization system. Thus, we will develop modularized, extensible visualization components that can be used separately or in combination, depending on the user needs.
Because of the ubiquity of wireless in existing devices, we will initially focus on visualizing wireless (WiFi) data. This will be extended to include other data sources for wireless and fixed cyber assets.
