# Trustworthiness of Situational Awareness: Significance and Quantification
## 3 Security and Trust of Situational Awareness
### Impacts of Security Attacks on COP  
Since different aspects of SA are susceptible to attacks, it is possible that the situation reports collected and compiled by a commander's line staff, and the SA acquired by the COP builder are subjective, inaccurate, and compromised. For a trustworthy COP, it is imperative to have consistency in the measurements, methods, and values within the COP. For example, let us see the effect of security attacks on SA and COP for a compromised link. If one of the links to the COP, such as aircraft positions and flight paths, becomes broken or compromised, it can affect the following factors regarding the COP and the commander's SA [14]:  
Figure 2: Security issues in situational awareness [3].  
If the _COP displays the last available aircraft positions and flight paths_, the COP will not be accurate anymore. In this case, the commander is able to notice the failure of the communication link, and he/she will realize there are aircraft whose positions and paths are not current in the COP, but can impact the operation. If the commander is not able to discern that the link is down (i.e., not available), he/she will keep on trusting the displayed COP as real-time information;
2. If the _COP erases the last available aircraft positions and flight paths_, then the COP will not be accurate anymore. In this case, the commander will not be certain whether there are actually no aircraft in the region of interest or whether no aircraft are shown in the COP because the link is down. In the case of link failure, the commander may envisage a few questions [14]:  
Is the link down because of sabotage, attack, interference, or benign failure?
2. In cases where the link was sabotaged, what is the purpose behind that and which enemy force is responsible?
3. Can the data be trusted if the link becomes live again?
4. Will he/she be notified that the link is down?  
From this example, we can see that the commander may be preoccupied with the above questions rather than focusing on the C2 operation. If the COP cannot be trusted, it can affect the commander's ability to make appropriate decisions, which can impact the result of the warfare and the safety of the troops and first responders. It has been observed that a commander either chooses to trust the COP or completely disregards it [14]. It is possible that, due to a single compromised element (e.g., sensor, equipment), the COP is not 100% accurate, but because it affects the trustworthiness of the COP, the commander may discard the entire COP as untrustworthy. This results in accurate inputs to the COP being unnecessarily ignored, which negatively impacts SA.  
Since security attacks on SA can have serious consequences, defending against these security attacks is of tremendous significance to maintaining the trust and integrity of SA and COP. To assure that the SA acquired by the commander is trustworthy, security primitives need to be integrated in SA system design [3]. Furthermore, if the information is gathered remotely through a multitude of sensors and sources, the integrity of the data links becomes critical to providing trustworthy SA. Also, computing systems responsible for information fusion and COP generation need to be secure and trustworthy for obtaining a trustworthy SA. As it has been observed that commanders tend to totally disregard the COP when there are integrity issues in the COP, quantifying the integrity of SA and COP can help restore the trust of commander in the COP and thus help improve SA.