Building a Scientific Foundation for Security: Multilayer Network Model Insights for System Security Engineering

Abstract

AbstractTo help incorporate security into INCOSE's Systems Engineering Vision 2035, the INCOSE systems security engineering working group endorses a paradigmatic shift to reframe systems security as trustworthy, loss‐driven, and capabilities‐based. Similar research out of Sandia National Laboratories has explored cutting‐edge approaches to systems security for national security applications. Together, these efforts highlight the need for—‐and a path toward—‐a scientific foundation for security. Leveraging underlying tenets of systems theory, observed security heuristics, and the concepts emerging from INCOSE's SSE working helps triangulate a set of “first principles” as part of a scientific foundation for security as an emergent systems property that incorporates traditional physical security designs, cyber security architectures, and personnel security programs—‐as well as the (often ignored) interactions between them. These first principles, in turn, are the basis for a set of derived systems security performance axioms that support current INCOSE SSE working efforts. We have demonstrated this approach's logic and designability with a multilayer network model‐based approach for systems security. The structure of this scientific foundation for security offers additional, innovative opportunities to achieve desired levels of trustworthiness, creative mechanisms to meet needs, innovative loss‐driven approaches, and enhanced capabilities—‐all aimed at producing more efficient and effective systems security solutions against current and emerging threats, uncertainties, and complexities.