Situational Awareness as a Measure of Performance in Cyber Security Collaborative Work

Conference · Mon Apr 11 04:00:00 EDT 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/ITNG.2011.161· OSTI ID:1043138

Malviya, Ashish; Fink, Glenn A; Sego, Landon H; Endicott-Popovsky, Barbara E

Cyber defense competitions arising from U.S. service academy exercises, offer a platform for collecting data that can inform research that ranges from characterizing the ideal cyber warrior to describing behaviors during certain challenging cyber defense situations. This knowledge in turn could lead to better preparation of cyber defenders in both military and civilian settings. We conducted proof of concept experimentation to collect data during the Pacific-rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (PRCCDC) and analyzed it to study the behavior of cyber defenders. We propose that situational awareness predicts performance of cyber security professionals, and in this paper we focus on our collection and analysis of competition data to determine whether it supports our hypothesis. In addition to normal cyber data, we collected situational awareness and workload data and compared it against the performance of cyber defenders as indicated by their competition score. We conclude that there is a weak correlation between our measure of situational awareness and performance that we hope to exploit in further studies.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1043138
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-77352
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
COMPUTER NETWORKS
HYPOTHESIS
PERFORMANCE
Pacific-rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition
SECURITY
US service academy exercise
behavioural sciences
collaborative work
competition data analysis
competition data collection
competition score
cyber defender behavior
cyber defense competition
cyber defense situation
cyber security
cyber warrior
groupware
proof-of-concept experimentation
security of data
situational awareness