Multi-Mission Engineering With Zero Trust: A Modeling Methodology and Application to Contested Offshore Wind Farms

Abstract

With the growth of autonomy and augmentation of machine learning in system decision-making, systems-of-systems (SoS) have become increasingly complex. Security and safety, as well as national economic stability, are reliant on interconnected systems with multiple decision making components. While such inter-connectivity advances the speed at which action and mission control decision making can take place, it also increases the number of dependencies at risk in the case of an attack and the speed at which attacks become effective in their goals. Attacks on the supply chain and on system lifecycle phases other than the operation are also becoming more common. In this paper we consider from a mission engineering perspective a complex reconfigurable SoS covering management of a wind farm with autonomous uncrewed patrol systems, crewed maintenance vessels, back-end control and machine learning components. The complex SoS is situated in the exclusive economic zone of one country, but with perimetric position to regional power competitors. We investigate causal effects of adversarial capabilities in the case study, using a zero trust combined with Defense in Depth approach. Of particular interest are situations where an adversary injects an incipient fault during one mission that is only brought to fruition during a subsequent mission.