Multi-lateral Cybersecurity Cooperation for Military Forces in the Digital Transformation Era

Most organizations including armed forces continuously invested on security solutions such as security information and event management, next generation firewall and intrusion prevention systems to improve their cybersecurity capabilities. Even though most legacy monitoring tools can detect cyber threats, the warfighting and business information systems remain vulnerable to modified or unknown threats since those are evolved continuously in a covert manner. At the Seoul Defense Dialogue (SDD) Cyber Working Group (CWG) 2017, we discussed several agendas related to the civil-military cooperative effort those can improve cybersecurity capabilities with high-risk/high-payoff research in the digital transformation era. The essence is granting the cyber workforces access to appropriate data from various sources needed to assure mission completeness based on the current technological achievement. In various situations, military operations must be synchronized with kinetic forces by appropriate cyber information. For this purpose, the cyber situational awareness (SA) provides the risk mitigation and the resilience capability for the mission completeness. To improve SA capabilities, it is important to share data with big data and machine learning technology among civil-military and international cooperation especially for defensive cyber operations. In this paper we described the lessons learned from SDD CWG to improve the state of the cybersecurity and the cognitive technology for the improved cyber situational awareness.