Deployment and Operation

Autonomous Intelligence Cyber-defense Agents are expected to operate in a continuous, unmanned, collaborative capacity in a variety of target network or battlefield environments. They should be able to maintain situational awareness of the nature of the cyber environment and other “agents” within it, monitor for activity that presents a potential threat or advantage, incorporate new knowledge into their environmental model, share parameters of such a model with peers, and take appropriate actions to maximize their own mission success and/or survival (potentially in a collaborative manner). In this chapter, we analyze several scenarios to consider the types of threats such agents might be expected to encounter and what actions would potentially be beneficial for them to take in response. These scenarios include an unmanned automated system (UAS, or “drone”) – solo or as part of a swarm, an electrical distribution grid, an orbital or deep-space communication network, and a large-scale computational array (such as found in a cloud vendor offering or high-performance computing).