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This report reviews the state of cyber attribution and examines alternative options for producing standardized and transparent attribution that may overcome concerns about credibility. In particular, it considers the value of an independent, global organization whose mission consists of investigating and publicly attributing major cyber attacks.

This report presents a framework for the development of metrics-and a method for scoring them-that indicates how well a U.S. Air Force mission or system is expected to perform in a cyber-contested environment. There are two types of cyber metrics: working-level metrics to counter an adversary's cyber operations and institutional-level metrics to capture any cyber-related organizational deficiencies.

In the past 20 years, the U.S. government, championed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and in collaboration with other public and private entities, has made considerable progress enumerating the country's critical infrastructure components and National Critical Functions (NCFs). However, these efforts have not enabled specific identification of the most-critical computing systems within networks. To help fill that gap, researchers from the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center sought to examine and enumerate the businesses that provide the most-critical information technology (IT) products and services and lay the groundwork for DHS and other federal and private-sector elements to better apply a risk-based approach to protecting the country's most-important assets and systems. They sought to (1) create a prioritized list of software and businesses that provide IT products and services and (2) develop a framework that could continue and extend this analysis into the future to accommodate emerging technologies and the evolution of the technology market. The work featured four workstreams: (1) identifying and integrating disparate data sources to identify the most-critical vulnerabilities and software applications in the U.S. internet protocol space; (2) collecting original data to map the software dependency and ownership structure of the most-referenced libraries; (3) leveraging existing work to identify specific IT and communication companies that were most interconnected and could suffer the greatest economic loss; and (4) developing a way to link NCFs to actual software companies supporting those functions.

RAND researchers constructed a Burdensharing Index to aid in measuring and analyzing the contributions that U.S. allies make to the collective defense of the post-World War II liberal international order.

The Defense Department increasingly relies on electric power to accomplish critical missions. This report explores two approaches for deterring attacks against the U.S. power grid: deterrence by denial and deterrence by cost imposition.

The Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO) program is efficiently run and effectively reuses excess Department of Defense property, but this is unlikely to resolve perceptions that the program contributes to the militarization of police.

This report documents an analysis, conducted in response to the California Public Banking Option Act, of the feasibility of a program aimed at facilitating basic financial transactions for unbanked and underbanked Californians.

RAND researchers review the motivations for adaptive basing, describe a footprint model used for estimating its implications for Agile Combat Support (ACS), and discuss recommendations for the ACS community and the U.S. Air Force at large.