Measuring the Impact of Tactical Denial of Sustainability

Abstract

The adoption of the latest advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) at the military operational edge raises promising points of disruption, emphasizing significant improvements in decision support, information sharing, and situational awareness acquisition. Among these, tactical clouds are perceived as necessary assets for achieving information and cyberspace sovereignty, serving as backbone for other cyber functionalities and their connectivity to the kinetic world. However, the attacks against the sustainability of tactical clouds, commonly referred to as Tactical Denial of Sustainability attacks (TDoS), pose one of the challenges that is mostly attracting the attention of the research community, mainly due to its asymmetric nature and cross-domain implications. Hence, the TDoS concept has been conceptually explored and analyzed through vignettes and case of study; but to date no previous work has addressed the problem of its measurement and quantification. With the aim of their understanding, this paper presents a research work that addressed the problem of identifying and analyzing mission-centric Measures of Effectives (MOEs), Measure of Performance (MOPs) and quantitative/qualitative Performance Indicators (PI) able to detect and assess TDoS situations. These measurements embrace capacity, technological, socio-cognitive and energetic aspects, discussing their possible application at offensive and defensive thinking.