Denial of sustainability on military tactical clouds

As the digitalization of the military conflicts increases, gaining decision superiority become the key to enhance the likelihood of success, which among others is enabled by bringing to the tactical edge emerging ICT paradigms like advanced data fusion, Artificial Intelligence, distributed computation or end-to-trust. Based on them, Tactical Clouds will allow the provisioning of C3 services for enhancing the development of the tactical pillars of modern join military operations, like Intelligence, Surveillance, Situational Awareness, or support to decision-making. But the adoption of new technological enablers bring novel and unexplored challenges that when no remediated, may jeopardize the operability of the digital tactical assets, being the cyber defence an essential cornerstone for their safeguarding. In these grounds, the main purpose of the conducted research is to review and analyze the denial of sustainability problem on tactical combat clouds; which entails a rara avis topic on the existing bibliography among other due to the novelty, secrecy and low level of technological maturity on their related digital enablers. The research presents and scoping action that developed the following secondary objectives: 1) to frame the denial of sustainability threats on the emerging Tactical Cloud paradigm; 2) to formalize the Tactical Denial of Sustainability (TDoS) concept; 3) to introduce the phasing, potential attack surfaces, terrains and impact of TDoS attacks; 4) to illustrate heterogeneous CONOPS that facilitate the understanding of TDoS; and 5) to raise and encourage the development of further research topics and actions.