Making the Case for Cybersecurity
1.4 INTEROPERABILITY STANDARDS AND AUTOMATION
To realize this vision, interoperability standards are essential. For knowledge items to flow across tools, organizations, and lifecycle stages, they must be represented in a shared, semantically meaningful format— understood not just by people, but by machines.
Traditional pipelines rely on bespoke integrations and siloed toolchains. But to automate reasoning about risk and assurance, we need common models, shared vocabularies, and standardized structures that allow diverse tools to interpret and act on the same underlying knowledge.
Interoperability standards provide this foundation. They define how digital knowledge items are described, linked and exchanged across tools and organizations. Without a shared semantic foundation, digital threads break and automation stalls.
With these standards in place, pipeline stages can be triggered by fine-grained changes— not just to code, but to mission assumptions, system configurations, or updated intelligence. When a new attack technique appears, or a design element changes, the affected portions of the security argument can be automatically re-evaluated, generating updated risk posture and informing relevant stakeholders.
Ultimately, interoperability transforms the cybersecurity pipeline into a living, adaptive knowledge graph— where tools act on shared semantics, and each stakeholder contributes to, and benefits from, a continuously evolving understanding of system and mission risk.
2 SYSTEM FACTS AS FOUNDATIONAL KNOWLEDGE FOR CYBERSECURITY PIPELINES
What is the foundation for the assurance case? Cybersecurity, when approached as a continuous and fine-grained knowledge-driven process, is founded on a clear, machine-readable understanding of the system itself. These " system facts "— models of structure, behavior, interfaces, dependencies, and operational context— form the semantic foundation for tailoring other knowledge domains: threat intelligence, vulnerability data, assurance arguments, and security controls. Without accurate and interpretable system representations, automated analysis and adaptive defense are impossible.
At the heart of this system-level knowledge flow are two key modeling languages: SysML( Systems Modeling Language) [ 7 ] and UAF( Unified Architecture Framework) [ 8 ]. Together, they underpin Model-Based Systems Engineering( MBSE) and Mission Engineering, enabling stakeholders to build semantically rich, structured representations of systems-of-systems, mission objectives, and their interdependencies.
2.1 SYSML: FROM COMMUNICATION TO COMPUTATION
SysML has revolutionized the way engineers specify and communicate designs. In contrast to the fragmented document-based approaches of the past— where PowerPoint, spreadsheets, and ad
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