Security-driven Prioritization for Tactical Mobile Networks.

Public safety and security authorities utilize tactical mobile networks to enable communications in situations where fixed infrastructure is unavailable. While these rapidly deployable networks rely on open standards, and support emerging applications and cross-organization federation, they are also vulnerable for cyber and insider threats. Active cybersecurity and threat detection solutions must work in isolated tactical bubbles without human interactions and cannot assume connectivity to remote security operations centers. This study explores the concept of a tactical security operations center (T-SOC) and presents an approach to adapting mobile network applications based on security monitoring and analytics. The security-driven prioritization of traffic flows demonstrates, first, a security decision making that is based on traffic analysis and security posture assessment and, second, an intelligent security response to availability threats by dynamically adjusting quality parameters of live video streams. We describe field trialed implementations based on open-source components and measure and analyze trade-offs between edge and cloud-based deployments. We also discuss other potential reaction strategies, such as trust-based routing, and present directions for future research.