Strategic Competition in Cyberspace: Measuring the Effects of Cyber campaigning through Experimental Methodology
Program: DECUR Partnership
Co-Principal Investigators: Richard J. Harknett, University of Cincinnati and J.D. Work, National Defense University
Years of Award: 2023-2025
Managing Service Agency: OSD Minerva
Project Description:
The 2022 National Defense Strategy identifies “campaigning” as one of three ways in which the Department of Defense will protect national interests. The social science empirical basis for evaluating campaigning in cyberspace through open-source data is limited (and close to non-existent). This critical lack of accessible data constrains academic contributions to the field of cyber security studies and the study of cyber strategic competition. Thus, much research on “cyber operations” or “cyber conflict” tends to focus on technical reports and public accounts of attacks well after the fact. Although this supports important case study examination of cyber security, it tends to be limited to partial pictures that do not capture the actual interactions between attackers and defenders and allow for differentiation of the dynamics of cyber operations relative to cyber campaigns. Our response to this challenge seeks to expand on researchers’ ability to utilize experimental designs and simulation environments to produce unique datasets that will enable them to better examine cyber operations and campaign dynamics and evaluate the efficacy of various cyber strategies