CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: Cyber defenders must interact with a variety of diverse feeds and explore network informat

Description

Cyber defenders must interact with a variety of diverse feeds and explore network information in many abstract contexts. Unfortunately, existing digital tools provide poor affordances for the perception and manipulation of critical metrics of network trustworthiness, unnecessarily complicating the network defense task and increasing cognitive workload. To address these challenges, we propose to design, demonstrate, and evaluate a system for Tangible Trustworthiness for Mixed-Initiative Network Defense (T2-MIND). T2-MIND will improve the efficiency and efficacy of network security by providing novel, tangible controls and interfaces that merge the intuitive affordances of physical control objects with the power of modern digital systems. Three main components characterize our approach. First, we will use demonstrated cognitive systems engineering methods to identify metrics of trustworthiness that are useful to cyber defenders in a dynamic, adversarial network security environment. Second, we will capture these metrics through tangible user interface controls that extend the physical affordances of security tools and provide high-visual-momentum displays that reduce the cognitive workload of cyber defenders moving between abstract representations of network status. Third, we will use an iterative design approach to develop prototypes that capture the underlying cognitive work, analytical tasks, and workflows specific to cyber defenders.