Beyond Security: A Data Quality Perspective on

Conventional approaches to defensive information warfare (IW) focus primarily on physical security, electronic countermeasures and encryption techniques. These areas focus on preserving system availability and data secrecy. However, these areas control only a small subset of the range of impacts that information warfare attacks can have on information data quality attributes provided to users. For example, subtle changes to information timeliness, accuracy and credibility can have significant impact on military command and control yet pass undetected through standard computer security safeguards. In this paper, we take an information quality perspective to investigate how compromises to information quality can propagate through a data flow with implications for operational users. We describe a capability to help the IW warrior predict the propagation of corrupted data and it's meta-data quality attributes through a complex information system. This capability can have a significant impact on command and control operations. *This paper is the opinion of the authors and should not be construed as having the concurrence or endorsement of their agencies.