Realizing Forward Defense in the Cyber Domain
It addresses cybersecurity for defense organizations by proposing a domain-specific architecture, but it is incremental as it adapts existing military concepts to cyberspace.
The paper tackles the problem of applying forward defense to cyberspace by presenting an architecture to repulse adversarial actions near their origin, but notes that substantial work remains for operational implementation.
With the recognition of cyberspace as an operating domain, concerted effort is now being placed on addressing it in the whole-of-domain manner found in land, sea, undersea, air, and space domains. Among the first steps in this effort is applying the standard supporting concepts of security, defense, and deterrence to the cyber domain. This paper presents an architecture that helps realize forward defense in cyberspace, wherein adversarial actions are repulsed as close to the origin as possible. However, substantial work remains in making the architecture an operational reality including furthering fundamental research cyber science, conducting design trade-off analysis, and developing appropriate public policy frameworks.