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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

The Impact of Cultural Values and Organizational Processes on Nuclear Security Operations

Human performance is a pivotal factor in the design, testing, maintenance, and operation of security systems. The effectiveness of these systems relies not only on the capabilities, limitations, motives, and attitudes of the individuals involved, but also on the quality of training, instructional content, and evaluation methods provided. To uphold security standards, seamless integration between technologies and operators necessitates reliable human input. In security operations, human errors, often attributed to blame, sanctions, low motivation, individual accountability, or complacency, are primary causes of system failures. Complacency, characterized by a false sense of security, reflects a lack of awareness of potential threats and is a significant contributing factor to lapses in security. Security incidents arise from various factors, many extend beyond individual control, highlighting the need for a holistic approach to human performance that integrates organizational processes and team collaboration. Historically, errors have been attributed to individual moral or cognitive failures. However, insights from Operational Experiences (OEs) suggest that organizational processes weakness and deficiencies in nuclear cultural values contribute more significantly to security failures than individual mistakes. This paper consolidates lessons learned from diverse international nuclear security cultures and aims to highlight the importance of security culture in shaping global perspectives on nuclear security. It underscores the role of cultural values in shaping nuclear security practices and enhancing the resilience of security systems in the nuclear sector.

Zineddin, Dr. Z. [ORNL] (ORCID:0009000848740725)↗
NASA NTRS2010

Anatomy of a Security Operations Center

Many agencies and corporations are either contemplating or in the process of building a cyber Security Operations Center (SOC). Those Agencies that have established SOCs are most likely working on major revisions or enhancements to existing capabilities. As principle developers of the NASA SOC; this Presenters' goals are to provide the GFIRST community with examples of some of the key building blocks of an Agency scale cyber Security Operations Center. This presentation viII include the inputs and outputs, the facilities or shell, as well as the internal components and the processes necessary to maintain the SOC's subsistence - in other words, the anatomy of a SOC. Details to be presented include the SOC architecture and its key components: Tier 1 Call Center, data entry, and incident triage; Tier 2 monitoring, incident handling and tracking; Tier 3 computer forensics, malware analysis, and reverse engineering; Incident Management System; Threat Management System; SOC Portal; Log Aggregation and Security Incident Management (SIM) systems; flow monitoring; IDS; etc. Specific processes and methodologies discussed include Incident States and associated Work Elements; the Incident Management Workflow Process; Cyber Threat Risk Assessment methodology; and Incident Taxonomy. The Evolution of the Cyber Security Operations Center viII be discussed; starting from reactive, to proactive, and finally to proactive. Finally, the resources necessary to establish an Agency scale SOC as well as the lessons learned in the process of standing up a SOC viII be presented.

Wang, John↗
DOE OSTI2020

An Assessment of the Usability of Machine Learning Based Tools for the Security Operations Center

Gartner, a large research and advisory company, anticipates that by 2024 80% of security operation centers (SOCs) will use machine learning (ML) based solutions to enhance their operations. 1 1 https://www.ciodive.com/news/how-data-science-tools-can-lighten-the-load-for-cybersecurity-teams/572209/ In light of such widespread adoption, it is vital for the research community to identify and address usability concerns. This work presents the results of the first in situ usability assessment of ML-based tools. With the support of the US Navy, we leveraged the national cyber range-a large, air-gapped cyber testbed equipped with state-of-the-art network and user emulation capabilities-to study six US Naval SOC analysts' usage of two tools. Our analysis identified several serious usability issues, including multiple violations of established usability heuristics for user interface design. We also discovered that analysts lacked a clear mental model of how these tools generate scores, resulting in mistrust a and/or misuse of the tools themselves. Surprisingly, we found no correlation between analysts' level of education or years of experience and their performance with either tool, suggesting that other factors such as prior background knowledge or personality play a significant role in ML-based tool usage. Our findings demonstrate that ML-based security tool vendors must put a renewed focus on working with analysts, both experienced and inexperienced, to ensure that their systems are usable and useful in real-world security operations settings.

Oesch, T↗
DOE OSTI2023

LDRD23-0184: Resilience and Hazard Risk Assessment to Prioritize Security Operations for Decisions and Impacts (RHAPSODI)

Recent examples provide a significant concern for the resilience of the U.S. electric grid and represent a need for enhanced decision-making to address an increasingly wide range of complex system interactions and potential consequences. In response, this LDRD project produced a proof-of-concept evaluation called the Resilience and Hazard Assessment to Prioritize Security Operations for Decisions and Impacts (RHAPSODI) methodology as an agile and flexible analytic framework capable of addressing multiple, diverse threats to desired electric grid performance. After empirically grounding needs for the future of U.S. electric grid resilience, this project employed the systems-theoretic process analysis (STPA) to develop a systems engineering risk model. The results of a completed feasibility study of a notional high voltage transmission system demonstrate an improved ability to incorporate both spatial (e.g., geographically distributed) and temporal (e.g., dynamic and time-dependent) elements of security risk to the gird. The success of this LDRD project provides the foundation for further evolution of the systems engineering risk model for the grid; derivation of quantitative approaches to evaluate risk and resilience performance; facilitation of agile experimenting and grid sensitivity to a range of vulnerabilities; and development of tools to assist decision-makers in enhancing U.S. electrical grid resilience.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2022

CPES-QSM: A Quantitative Method Towards the Secure Operation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Power systems are evolving into cyber-physical energy systems (CPES) mainly due to the integration of modern communication and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. CPES security evaluation is challenging since the physical and cyber layers are often not considered holistically. Existing literature focuses on only optimizing the operation of either the physical or cyber layer while ignoring the interactions between them. This paper proposes a metric, the Cyber-Physical Energy System Quantitative Security Metric (CPES-QSM), that quantifies the interaction between the cyber and physical layers across three domains: electrical, cyber-risk, and network topology. A method for incorporating the proposed cyber-metric into operational decisions is also proposed by formulating a cyber-constrained AC optimal power flow (C-ACOPF) that considers the status of all the CPES layers. The C-ACOPF considers the vulnerabilities of physical and cyber networks by incorporating factors such as voltage stability, contingencies, graph-theory, and IoT cyber risks, while using a multi-criteria decision-making technique. We note that simulation studies are conducted using standard IEEE test systems to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed metric and the C-ACOPF formulation.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Towards Automated Assessment of Vulnerability Exposures in Security Operations

Current approaches for risk analysis of software vulnerabilities using manual assessment and numeric scoring do not complete fast enough to keep pace with the maintenance work rate to patch and mitigate the vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a new approach to modeling software vulnerability risk in the context of the network environment and firewall configuration. In the approach, vulnerability features are automatically matched up with networking, target asset, and adversary features to determine whether adversaries can exploit a vulnerability. The ability of adversaries to reach a vulnerability is modeled by automatically identifying the network services associated with vulnerabilities through a pipeline of machine learning and natural language processing and automatically analyzing network reachability. Our results show that the pipeline can identify network services accurately. We also find that only a small number of vulnerabilities pose real risks to a system. However, if left unmitigated, adversarial reach to vulnerabilities may extend to nullify the effect of firewall countermeasures.

Huff, Philip↗
NASA NTRS2016

NASA Blue Team: Determining Operational Security Posture of Critical Systems and Networks

Emergence of Cybersecurity has increased the focus on security risks to Information Technology (IT) assets going beyond traditional Information Assurance (IA) concerns: More sophisticated threats have emerged from increasing sources as advanced hacker tools and techniques have emerged and proliferated to broaden the attack surface available across globally interconnected networks.

cybersecurity↗
NASA NTRS2011

Autonomous Satellite Operations Via Secure Virtual Mission Operations Center

The science community is interested in improving their ability to respond to rapidly evolving, transient phenomena via autonomous rapid reconfiguration, which derives from the ability to assemble separate but collaborating sensors and data forecasting systems to meet a broad range of research and application needs. Current satellite systems typically require human intervention to respond to triggers from dissimilar sensor systems. Additionally, satellite ground services often need to be coordinated days or weeks in advance. Finally, the boundaries between the various sensor systems that make up such a Sensor Web are defined by such things as link delay and connectivity, data and error rate asymmetry, data reliability, quality of service provisions, and trust, complicating autonomous operations. Over the past ten years, researchers from the NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC), General Dynamics, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), Cisco, Universal Space Networks (USN), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Naval Research Laboratory, the DoD Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office, and others have worked collaboratively to develop a virtual mission operations capability. Called VMOC (Virtual Mission Operations Center), this new capability allows cross-system queuing of dissimilar mission unique systems through the use of a common security scheme and published application programming interfaces (APIs). Collaborative VMOC demonstrations over the last several years have supported the standardization of spacecraft to ground interfaces needed to reduce costs, maximize space effects to the user, and allow the generation of new tactics, techniques and procedures that lead to responsive space employment.

Miller, Eric↗