Making the Case for Cybersecurity
The digital transformation of critical infrastructure, services, and operations has outpaced the traditional models of cybersecurity. From cloud-native logistics to cyber-physical defense platforms, organizations now operate in highly dynamic, interconnected environments where failures cascade across systems, disrupt missions, business operations, and impact entire enterprises.
While cybersecurity has long been defined by the“ CIA triad”— confidentiality, integrity, and availability— these principles no longer capture the full scope of today’ s threats or operational demands. Disruption, deception, and degradation of function can be more damaging than data loss alone. Cybersecurity must evolve from protecting isolated digital assets to ensuring the resilience of mission-critical operations across system-of-systems.
At the same time, threats have become more persistent, well-resourced, and adaptive. Nationstate actors, criminal networks, and AI-driven tools now exploit not only code-level vulnerabilities, but also architectural flaws, configuration gaps, and supply chains.
Conventional cybersecurity practices— static controls, periodic audits, patching, and especially manual risk assessments— are increasingly misaligned with this reality. Risk assessment remains disconnected from DevSecOps and lack the speed, precision, and scalability needed to influence system evolution. Vulnerability scanners, and compliance checklists are useful – but they cannot reason about evolving risk in a timely, mission-aware context.
Today’ s environment demands a new paradigm- one that treats cyber risk as a continuously evolving property – proactive, system-aware, and computable throughout the lifecycle.
This article introduces Risk-Centric DevSecOps, a framework that integrates cybersecurity risk into the digital engineering pipelines as a continuous, structured reasoning process. Security becomes a first-class engineering concern, inseparable from system modeling, mission analysis, and operational decision-making.
At the core of this approach is the formal cybersecurity assurance case— a machine-consumable structure of claims and evidence that connects design models, threat intelligence, attacks, vulnerabilities and mitigation controls. The assurance case becomes more central than conventionally assumed – it can orchestrate how tools interpret risks, assess controls, and reason about adversarial capabilities. The assurance argument becomes the logic of cybersecurity and the control loop for automation- allowing systems to adapt intelligently, while maintaining traceable real-time assurance aligned with mission outcomes.
Cybersecurity in this model is no longer reactive or manually curated. Knowledge items— about systems, attack techniques, defenses, vulnerabilities and assurance— are machine-consumable, continuously updated, and semantically integrated. The assurance case becomes a systemspecific knowledge graph. As soon as the global community of cybersecurity researchers or engineers publish a change( e. g. a new CVE, a new attack technique, a new SBOM entry, or a new system function), it is pulled into the DevSecOps pipelines. Risk claims are recalculated, gaps in
38 May 2025