System Engineering Approach in Tactical Wireless RF Network Analysis [chapter]

Philip Chan, Hong Man, David Nowicki, Mo Mansouri
2012 Systems Engineering - Practice and Theory  
Main methodology Tactical wireless network vulnerabilities continually being reported and critically studied with many U.S. government organizations. The need for a comprehensive framework of www.intechopen.com Systems Engineering -Practice and Theory 310 network vulnerability assessment using systems engineering approach [24] [26] [27] [28] has been an increasing challenge to many research analysts. Researchers have proposed a more systematic way to manage wireless network nodes and trees with
more » ... possible chains of events, and then perform normal post-graph vulnerability assessments with system of systems methodology. The most recent system engineering approaches are building attack trees by trying to number all potential attack paths with vulnerabilities identification, node probabilities calculations, inference analysis, and weights assignments by system experts. These are expert driven vulnerabilities analysis. Assessment and identification are one of the main key issues in making sure the property security of a given deployed tactical RF communication network. The vulnerability assessment process involves many uncertain factors reside within both the networks and the network nodes. Threat assessment or injecting threats is one of the major factors of evaluating a situation for its suitability to support decision-making and the indication of the security of a given tactical RF communication network system. One approach is using experienced decision makers database. This type of expert driven database recorded most of their decisions on vulnerability identification. The decision-makers use past experience for their decisions. The decision will be based upon previously good solutions that have worked in similar real life scenarios. The approach is to extract the most significant characteristics from the lay-down situation. Any similar situations and actions that have worked well in past cases will be considered in the assessment due to the present or the lack of certain essential characteristics. The assessment and identification is to create relevant relations between objects in the tactical RF network environment. Tactical communication RF wireless networks are best illustrated by Mr. David L. Adamy [11] in his book. Bayesian network (BN) and the related methods [17] is an effective tool for modeling uncertainty situation and knowledge. This paper discusses Bayesian's Theory [17] , Bayesian networks and their ability to function in a given tactical RF communication network [11] for vulnerabilities analysis and identification. This short chapter presents an approach to use Bayesian network to model all potential vulnerabilities or attack paths in tactical RF wireless network. We will call such graph as "Bayesian network vulnerabilities graph" for a given tactical RF wireless network. It provides a more compact representation of attack paths than conventional methods. Bayesian inference methods can be used for probabilistic analysis. It is necessary to use algorithms for updating and computing optimal subsets of attack paths relative to current knowledge about attackers. Tactical RF wireless models were tested on a small example JCSS [12] network. Simulated test results demonstrate the effectiveness of approach. Why systems engineering is used here Systems engineering [7] [8] [27] [28] is applied here to assist the rapid design and development of complex systems such as tactical wireless communication systems. Systems engineering [29] uses engineering sciences techniques with operations research. Operations research also tackles with designing complex systems. Our goal is to utilize concurrent engineering principles in systems engineering analysis that covers our design goals and testing requirements in developing the RF communication system. The systems approach to solving complex problems are critical since integrating complex analysis and building of RF communication models requires synthesis of different methods. Systems approach is widely used and successful in fields of engineering, for example systems engineering. It is most
doi:10.5772/34230 fatcat:w6jmrdywwferbizeleeyqq7kry