What question did this study set out to answer?

The research aims to develop a framework for mission assurance that emphasizes protecting critical services over traditional cyber security methods.

April 24, 2026Open Access

Prioritising Mission Survivability Through Defensive Cyber Operations: A Unified Mission Assurance Approach

Key Points

The research aims to develop a framework for mission assurance that emphasizes protecting critical services over traditional cyber security methods.
Introduced the Unified Mission Assurance (UMA) framework.
Described a four-phase cyclical operation for mission assurance.
Applied the framework to an emergency response scenario.
The UMA framework streamlines the mission assurance process.
Improved systemic resilience was observed over enduring operations.
Potential impacts of the framework on emergent phenomena were discussed.

Abstract

Air missions are reliant on interconnected subsystems comprised of cyber, physical and human components. A breakdown in, or loss of, a component that delivers a mission essential service will have flow-on effects to operational lethality and survivability. In the cyber domain, taking a mission-centric approach to defending infrastructure instead of a traditional system-centric approach is called ‘mission assurance’. Cyber operations for mission assurance purposes focus on protecting critical mission services instead of simply securing cyber infrastructure. This work offers a novel approach to mission assurance in the form of a Unified Mission Assurance (UMA) framework. This framework simplifies the mission assurance process into a four-phase operation that can be applied cyclically over enduring operations to ensure that systemic resilience is improved over time. The model is described in detail and then applied to an emergency response scenario use case. Future work is detailed and the impact that the UMA framework can provide to build systemic resilience against emergent phenomena is discussed.

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