The Information Battlespace preparation experiment

As a part of the Cyber Command and Control (CC2) initiative within the Information Assurance and Survivability program, DARPA is sponsoring development of a prototype Intelligence Preparation of the Information Battlespace (IPIB) application. This effort attempts to map the kinetic warfare Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace (IPB) process to cyber defense. This project addresses three issues: whether it is feasible to identify cyberspace analogs for kinetic concepts such as terrain, weather, and adversary doctrine; whether an IPIB prototype would assist analysts to perform cyberspace IPB, and whether IPIB improves cyber defenses. The CC2 team conducted a whiteboard experiment to address the third, efficacy issue. This paper describes the experimental process, hypotheses to be tested, conduct of the experiment, results, and conclusions. We provide some lessons learned that should be of interest to the information assurance (IA) community at large.