Cyber Operations: A Look into the 5th Domain

Monday, November 11, 2013
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
(Pacific)
CISAC Conference Room
Speaker: 
  • Cynthia Irvine

About the Topic: Air, sea, land, and space are the traditional domains of military operations. Now, as the Information Age unfolds, cyberspace has become the fifth domain. The relative newness of cyberspace and the interdependencies between it and the preexisting domains pose many challenges, both in terms of the wise integration of cyber into ongoing operations and the creation of personnel with the right combination of technical and non-technical knowledge to apply activities on computers and networks in ways consistent with high-level policy. Cyber operations include both the defense of networks and computers, but also actions to achieve specific effects on adversaries.  These effects may extend to the physical world, or may be circumscribed entirely to cyber systems. Through examples and observations, this unclassified talk will illustrate the complexity of our quest to use cyber space.

About the Speaker: Dr. Cynthia Irvine is the chair of the Cyber Academic Group and director of the Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research (CISR) at the Naval Postgraduate School where she is a professor of computer science. Her research centers on the design and construction of secure high assurance systems and multilevel security, and now cyber systems and operations. She is an author on over 160 papers and reports and has supervised the research of over 140 Masters and PhD students. Dr. Irvine is a recipient of the Naval Information Assurance Award and the William Hugh Murray Founder’s Award from the Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education. She is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a lifetime member of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a Golden Core Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). From 2005 through 2009, she served as Vice- Chair and subsequently as Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy.