CAPD: A Context-Aware, Policy-Driven Framework for Secure and Resilient IoBT Operations
This addresses the problem of securing and ensuring resilience in military IoBT operations for infantry units, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ontology and policy-driven approaches.
The paper tackles the challenge of enabling secure and resilient collaboration among autonomous assets like sensors and drones in the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) by proposing CAPD, a context-aware, policy-driven framework that uses an ontology and knowledge graph to facilitate data sharing and reasoning, resulting in capabilities such as adaptive video transmission (e.g., reduced frame rate grayscale video) to maintain mission support under adversary attacks.
The Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) will advance the operational effectiveness of infantry units. However, this requires autonomous assets such as sensors, drones, combat equipment, and uncrewed vehicles to collaborate, securely share information, and be resilient to adversary attacks in contested multi-domain operations. CAPD addresses this problem by providing a context-aware, policy-driven framework supporting data and knowledge exchange among autonomous entities in a battlespace. We propose an IoBT ontology that facilitates controlled information sharing to enable semantic interoperability between systems. Its key contributions include providing a knowledge graph with a shared semantic schema, integration with background knowledge, efficient mechanisms for enforcing data consistency and drawing inferences, and supporting attribute-based access control. The sensors in the IoBT provide data that create populated knowledge graphs based on the ontology. This paper describes using CAPD to detect and mitigate adversary actions. CAPD enables situational awareness using reasoning over the sensed data and SPARQL queries. For example, adversaries can cause sensor failure or hijacking and disrupt the tactical networks to degrade video surveillance. In such instances, CAPD uses an ontology-based reasoner to see how alternative approaches can still support the mission. Depending on bandwidth availability, the reasoner initiates the creation of a reduced frame rate grayscale video by active transcoding or transmits only still images. This ability to reason over the mission sensed environment and attack context permits the autonomous IoBT system to exhibit resilience in contested conditions.