STO-Activities: (no title)

Activity title: Exploiting IoT and other Non-traditional Information Sources for Command and Control and Decision Making
Activity Reference: IST-223
Panel: IST
Security Classification: NATO UNCLASSIFIED
Status: Proposed
Activity type: RTG
Start date: 2024-09-01T00:00:00Z
Actual End date: 2027-09-01T00:00:00Z
Keywords: Civil Military Cooperation CIMIC, Command and Control, Data and Information Exploitation for Decision Making, Datacentric Security, Internet of Things IoT, Multidomain Operations MDO
Background: Internet of Things has become increasingly prevalent in all aspects of modern society and all indications are that this trend will continue, or perhaps even accelerate. The IST-147 Research Task Group (RTG) on Military Applications of IoT explored different aspects of military operations that could be influenced / affected by IoT. One primary finding was that the proper exploitation of IoT information, for example in future Smart City environments, could significantly improve the speed and breadth of Situation Awareness information that could be collected in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) scenarios.
The follow-on group, IST-176 RTG on Federated Interoperability of Military C2 and IoT systems explored different approaches to federate IoT data and to integrate it into existing C2 systems in use by different nations. The activities of this group revealed some key challenges towards IoT exploitation for Military C2, including the problem of managing (e.g., discovering, filtering, and processing) IoT devices and data feeds at scale. Notably, even if C2 systems could address the computational challenges of scaling IoT environments, much of the derived information could be considered unnecessary (or even interfering) from the perspective of military operations.
The new proposed RTG activity will extend prior work in the IST-147 and IST-176 RTGs and pursue research to facilitate effective exploitation of IoT information for the purpose of C2 decision making. Several challenges will need to be addressed in these efforts. For example, IoT devices tend to be quite heterogeneous in nature, with no consistency in terms of the mechanisms of access, the behavior of the IoT devices, or the format and semantics of the data being generated. In particular, finding, parsing, filtering, and processing of IoT information must be done in an automated fashion (e.g., by using autonomous agents, machine learning, etc.). The challenge here also includes potential trust issues associated with information originating from IoT devices and services, which may not be secured and maintained to the same level of integrity as traditional military systems and sensors and thus could be compromised. Finally, the group will also explore other non-traditional information sources that could be integrated and utilized in-parallel with IoT data feeds, such as social media derived content. Collectively, management of these challenges will additionally require techniques to enable assessment of IoT data and devices for mission fitness-for-use in C2 decision making scenarios.
Another important area for research is Multi Domain Operations (MDO), which has broad impact on the nature of conduct of military missions. In addition to the traditional Air, Land, Sea, Space, and Cyber domains, there is a desire now to incorporate the civilian domain as a sixth domain that can provide information to military operations. In this aspect, civilian IoT devices, sensors, and services could generate a large percentage of the information originating from the civilian domain. Successful exploitation of this information could provide a significant advantage to Situation Awareness and Military Decision Making, potentially enabling our forces to opportunistically identify and exploit weaknesses or other shortcomings of the adversary during operations.
We will consider and build upon previous work in within the NATO community including NATO IST-ET-121 on Identification of anomalies through behavior profiling of IoT, STO-TR-IST131 on Information Filtering and Multi-Source Information Fusion, as well as IST-193 on Edge Computing at the Tactical Edge.
Objectives: • Development of scenarios for experimentation that could be used to evaluate novel concepts and capabilities, including MDO scenarios with civilian data, and other data exploitation scenarios combining traditional and non-traditional information sources.
• Development or enhancement of simulations, emulations, or Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) environments for the purpose of experimentation.
• Identification of security threats and challenges that arise from integrating and exploiting non-traditional information sources, and mitigation strategies to address these challenges.
• Analysis of security mechanisms such as data-centric security and their applicability to non-traditional information.
• Survey of useful measures to provide resilience to adversarial manipulation of data.
• Exploration of techniques to handle discovery and selection of IoT devices and ingestion of IoT data given the lack of standardization amongst IoT deployments, for example in different cities.
• Exploration of federation and interoperability techniques and solutions to address the lack of standardization.
• Exploration of techniques to manage the large volume of IoT data, which could be mostly uninteresting or irrelevant to the military operation, for example by leveraging concepts such as autonomous agents and Value of Information (VoI).
• Exploration of techniques to facilitate transparency and corresponding validation of IoT source assessment and data management services.
• Exploration of architectures that can allow current C2 systems to incorporate new non-traditional information sources.
Topics: • Discovery of IoT assets
• Understanding and translation (potentially automated) of disparate IoT message formats
• Security, including understanding and conveying the trust level of the information
• Security challenges of exploiting civilian IoT sensors, information, and services
• Value of Information techniques to filter / reduce irrelevant information
• Techniques to support service transparency and validation
• Data-centric security architectures
• Effective approaches to storing / archiving and retrieval of relevant information
• Bandwidth and resource challenges of tactical networks, and effective approaches to managing large volumes of IoT data in these challenging environments
• Interoperability: protocols, interfaces (APIs), data, and services.
• Autonomous agents / automated information processing
• Edge Computing for Efficient Data Processing and Exploitation
• Effective mechanisms to process and exploit high volume, variety, velocity (3Vs) of IoT data (e.g., AI-based big-data analytics)
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Created at 29/04/2024 13:00 by System Account
Last modified at 16/05/2024 14:00 by System Account
 
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