Biblio

Military supply chains play a critical role in the acquisition and movement of goods for defence purposes. The disruption of these supply chain processes can have potentially devastating affects to the operational capability of military forces. The introduction and integration of new technologies into defence supply chains can serve to increase their effectiveness. However, the benefits posed by these technologies may be outweighed by significant consequences to the cyber security of the entire defence supply chain. Supply chains are complex Systems of Systems, and the introduction of an insecure technology into such a complex ecosystem may induce cascading system-wide failure, and have catastrophic consequences to military mission assurance. Subsequently, there is a need for an evaluative process to determine the extent to which a new technology will affect the cyber security of military supply chains. This work proposes a new model, the Military Supply Chain Cyber Implications Model (M-SCCIM), that serves to aid military decision makers in understanding the potential cyber security impact of introducing new technologies to supply chains. M-SCCIM is a multiphase model that enables understanding of cyber security and supply chain implications through the lenses of theoretical examinations, pilot applications and system wide implementations.

Integrating multiple programmable components and subsystems developed by different manufacturers into a final system (a system of systems) can create some security concerns. While there are many efforts for developing interoperability approaches to enable smooth, reliable and safe integration among different types of components to build final systems for different applications, less attention is usually given for the security aspects of this integration. This may leave the final systems exposed and vulnerable to potential security attacks. The issues elevate further when such systems are also connected to other networks such as the Internet or systems like fog and cloud computing. This issue can be found in important industrial applications like smart medical, smart manufacturing and smart city systems. As a result, along with performance, safety and reliability; multisystem integration must also be highly secure. This paper discusses the security issues instigated by such integration. In addition, it proposes a middleware framework to address the security issues for integrated multisystem applications.