The increasingly interconnected nature of modern military operations has created an unprecedented attack surface where a single digital vulnerability can have devastating physical consequences, demanding a fundamental shift in how defense systems are secured. Responding to this urgent need, academic researchers are undertaking a focused and strategic effort to adapt the principles of zero-trust security architecture for the highly critical domain of military weapon systems. Spearheading this initiative is Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI), which is actively launching new measures to propel the zero-trust space forward. Key personnel, including SEI’s situational awareness technical manager Tim Morrow and principal cybersecurity analyst Christopher Alberts, are guiding an ambitious study on zero trust for weapon systems. Their primary objective is to raise awareness and provide actionable implementation guidance within both the private and public sectors, with a pronounced emphasis on tailoring these modern cybersecurity concepts to the unique operational realities of military hardware and missions on the front lines.
The D-DIL Dilemma Adapting to Battlefield Realities
To ensure its research remains directly relevant to the evolving nature of modern warfare, the Software Engineering Institute is deeply engaged with its customers, including a pivotal partnership with the U.S. Army. This collaboration underscores a major trend and a significant constraint: the military’s strategic shift toward cloud-based and multi-cloud operations. However, this modernization must contend with the harsh reality of “denied, degraded, intermittent and low-bandwidth” (D-DIL) environments. Tim Morrow highlights the stark contrast between a stable, high-bandwidth enterprise network and a tactical field setting that relies on unpredictable connections like Wi-Fi or satellite links. This operational environment poses a formidable challenge to implementing traditional zero-trust models, which often depend on constant communication for verification and policy enforcement. Consequently, a core part of SEI’s research is dedicated to determining what is truly “reasonable to apply for zero trust” in these constrained settings, moving the concept from a theoretical ideal to a practical battlefield tool.
The challenge of operating in D-DIL environments has pushed SEI researchers to develop sophisticated frameworks for understanding and accepting the inherent risks involved in security trade-offs. The goal is not just to implement zero trust but to do so intelligently, ensuring that critical missions can proceed even when connectivity is compromised. To enrich this understanding, SEI is also actively seeking to team up with experts from other Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) and University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs). By leveraging a wider pool of knowledge, the institute aims to better define realistic expectations for zero-trust security, especially as it intersects with cloud-native services across diverse and mobile platforms such as naval ships and combat aircraft. This collaborative approach ensures that the solutions being developed are robust, versatile, and applicable to the wide array of scenarios faced by military personnel in both current and future missions across the globe.
The Brain of the Operation The Policy Decision Point
The technical core of SEI’s research is concentrated on a critical component of the zero-trust architecture: the Policy Decision Point (PDP). While a complete zero-trust environment consists of two major pillars—Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) and the PDP—it is the latter that is becoming a major focal point for the CMU researchers. The PDP is envisioned as a sophisticated mechanism capable of dynamically assessing and analyzing individual data points in real time. Its essential function is to determine critical contextual information, such as whether an access request is originating from a human or nonhuman source, and to evaluate both its potential to successfully complete a desired operation and its authorization to access specific data streams. Tim Morrow asserts that effectively leveraging such a dynamic system necessitates a fundamental “change in mindset” away from the static, perimeter-based security rules that have long dominated cybersecurity thinking and proven insufficient for the modern threat landscape.
This evolution toward dynamic security enforcement means that policies must be developed with field deployment in mind from the outset, enabling on-the-spot analysis and risk-based decision-making in active operational theaters. Morrow provides a vivid example of the kind of complex, context-aware question a modern PDP must answer: “This person who’s standing at this place in this country at this time of the day with these types of credentials, should you allow that or not?” This single query illustrates the profound shift towards continuous, contextual verification that defines the zero-trust model. Furthering this research, a specialized team at SEI is focusing specifically on developing the advanced algorithms required to power these decisions. The challenge lies in moving beyond simple rule-based systems to explore more sophisticated models while carefully considering their performance impact in the resource-constrained environments typical of tactical military hardware.
Building a New Foundation for Weapon System Security
The foundation for SEI’s current and future work is a recently conducted study that meticulously analyzed the applicability of zero-trust security principles specifically to weapon systems. This foundational research represents the initial step in a broader journey to raise awareness and establish clear, actionable guidance. To ensure a thorough evaluation, the research team employed a multi-faceted methodology that included deep-dive research, extensive interviews with a wide range of subject matter experts, and the collection of vast amounts of operational data. A key finding from this effort was the development of a more holistic risk strategy framework. As explained by Christopher Alberts, the team looked beyond traditional security functions to create a comprehensive set of principles mapped across five key areas: protect, detect, respond, recover, and adapt. This expanded framework ensures a more complete and resilient approach to securing complex military systems against a determined adversary.
The study’s process involved a painstaking analysis of each security principle based on the gathered data, exploring how it could be instantiated within a weapon system and carefully documenting the associated risks and trade-offs in a final report. This foundational research brought four major areas of importance to light: mission context, system attributes, the threat environment, and the trade-off space. A significant challenge identified during this process was the difficulty in finding personnel who possess deep expertise across all four of these critical and interdependent domains. This highlights a crucial need for enhanced education and new mental models for system developers and operators alike. To address this “guidance gap,” the SEI team is now developing practical tools, such as an instrument or questionnaire, designed to help their customers better understand these complex interdependencies and make more informed security decisions for their systems.
A New Paradigm for Defense Cybersecurity
This comprehensive body of research, collaboration, and education was designed to culminate in three major strategic goals for the Software Engineering Institute. First, the team aimed to provide defense officials with a formal zero-trust acquisition framework. Such an achievement, as Morrow noted, would empower the Department of War to seek out and procure zero-trust capabilities in a structured, repeatable, and cost-effective way, ensuring that new systems are built with modern security principles from the ground up. The second goal was to champion the importance of good engineering practices within mission, software, and system development. The express intention behind this was to inspire developers to build more effective, secure, and resilient technologies for soldiers on the front lines, recognizing that robust security begins long before a system is ever deployed in the field. These efforts were intended to create a lasting cultural shift toward security-first design.
The third and perhaps most transformative goal was to spearhead a move away from periodic, compliance-based security evaluations toward a model of continuous, near-real-time zero-trust assessments. Morrow explained that the existing Continuous Authority-to-Operate (cATO) process often involved evaluations that might happen only once a year or, in some cases, every five years, leaving significant windows of vulnerability. The SEI team believed that the capabilities inherent in a zero-trust architecture could accomplish the goals of a cATO far more efficiently and effectively. By leveraging zero trust, security validation could become an ongoing process that occurs in near real-time, providing a constantly updated and accurate picture of a system’s security posture. This work was expected to produce a profound improvement in overall cybersecurity, with advancements that promised to “make a big difference in improving the security of the systems.”
