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One issue confounding the development and experimentation of distributed modeling and simulation
environments is the inability of the project team to identify and collaborate with resources, both human and
technical, from outside the United States. This limitation is especially significant within the human behavior
representation area where areas such as cultural effects research and joint command team behavior modeling
require the participation of various cultural and national representatives. To address this limitation, as well
as other human behavior representation research issues, NATO Research and Technology Organization
initiated a project to develop a NATO virtual institute that enables more effective and more collaborative
research into human behavior representation.
However, in building and operating a virtual institute one of the chief concerns must be the cyber
security of the institute. Because the institute "exists" in cyberspace, all of its activities are susceptible to
cyberattacks, subterfuge, denial of service and all of the vulnerabilities that networked computers must face.
In our opinion, for the concept of virtual institutes to be successful and useful, their operations and services
must be protected from the threats in the cyber environment. A key to developing the required protection is
the development and promulgation of standards for cyber security. In this paper, we discuss the types of
cyber standards that are required, how new internet technologies can be exploited and can benefit the
promulgation, development, maintenance, and robustness of the standards. This paper is organized as
follows. Section One introduces the concept of the virtual institutes, the expected benefits, and the
motivation for our research and for research in this area. Section Two presents background material and a
discussion of topics related to VIs, uman behavior and cultural modeling, and network-centric warfare.
Section Three contains a discussion of the security challenges that face the virtual institute and the
characteristics of the standards that must be employed. Section Four contains our proposal for
documentation of the cybersecurity standards. Section Five contains the conclusion and suggestions for
further work.
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