Conceptualization and cases of study on cyber operations against the sustainability of the tactical edge

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the risks and opportunities of cyber operations targeting military tactical clouds at the edge, formalizing the Tactical Denial of Sustainability concept and exploring its implications for cyber warfare and operational resilience.

Contribution

It introduces the novel TDoS concept, formalizes its framework, and provides detailed analysis and operational scenarios for cyber threats against tactical clouds.

Findings

TDoS attacks can significantly disrupt tactical cloud sustainability.

Cyber threats pose risks to energy efficiency and operational effectiveness.

The study offers five comprehensive CONOPS for understanding TDoS impacts.

Abstract

The last decade consolidated the cyberspace as fifth domain of operations, which extends its preliminarily intelligence and information exchange purposes towards enabling complex offensive and defensive operations supported/supportively of parallel kinetic domain actuations. Although there is a plethora of well documented cases on strategic and operational interventions of cyber commands, the cyber tactical military edge is still a challenge, where cyber fires barely integrate to the traditional joint targeting cycle due among others to long planning/development times, asymmetric effects, strict target reachability requirements, or the fast propagation of collateral damage; the latter rapidly deriving on hybrid impacts (political, economic, social, etc.) and evidencing significant socio-technical gaps. In this context, it is expected that tactical clouds disruptively facilitate cyber operations at the edge while exposing the rest of the digital assets of the operation to them. On these grounds, the main purpose of the conducted research is to review and in depth analyze the risks and opportunities of jeopardizing the sustainability of the military tactical clouds at the edge by cyber operations. Along with a 1) comprehensively formulation of the researched problematic, the study 2) formalizes the Tactical Denial of Sustainability (TDoS) concept; 3) introduces the phasing, potential attack surfaces, terrains and impact of TDoS attacks; 4) emphasizes the related human and socio-technical aspects; 5) analyzes the threats/opportunities inherent to their impact on the cloud energy efficiency; 6) reviews their implications at the military cyber thinking for tactical operations; 7) illustrates five extensive CONOPS that facilitate the understanding of the TDoS concept; and given the high novelty of the discussed topics, it 8) paves the way for further research and development actions.