USMA Athena

USMA Athena is a secure digital service managed by the United States Military Academy Library to make the work of USMA scholars freely available, while also ensuring these resources are organized to preserve the legacy of USMA scholarship. The mission of USMA Athena is to showcase the academic impact and intellectual capital that has become synonymous with the celebrated heritage of educational prowess attributed to the Long Gray Line. Scholarship submitted to USMA Athena benefits from added visibility and discoverability via Google Scholar in addition to the use of persistent URLs that will provide enduring access to the work over time.

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Recent Submissions

ItemOpen Access
Thinking Outside of the [Boodle]Box: Customizing Bots for Curriculum Mapping
(N/A, 2025-06-10) Dodd, Lauren; Mullooly, Lori; Chess, Jennifer; Tolman, Erin
This presentation describes how a team at the USMA Library leveraged Generative AI tools to develop a scaffolded Information Literacy curriculum aligned with the ACRL Framework, customized for their service academy context. Using BoodleBox's multi-bot capabilities and a custom Curriculum Mapping bot, the team mapped AI Literacy practices to an augmented ACRL Framework and aligned core course objectives with their custom framework, creating an efficient process that can serve as a roadmap for other academic libraries undertaking similar initiatives.
ItemOpen Access
The MIROR Journal: Managing Insider Risk and Organizational Resilience-Volume 1, Issue 1, Summer 2023
(West Point Press, 2023) Roginski, Jonathan W; Kallberg, Jan
The Managing Insider Risk & Organizational Resilience (MIROR) Journal (Online ISSN 2832-5427 Print ISSN 2832-5419) is a scholarly Open Access journal published by the West Point Press, the publishing arm of the United States Military Academy, and produced by the Insider Threat Research Research Program at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the United States Military Academy. The views expressed in the journal are those of the authors and not the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. Government. The mention of companies and/or products is for demonstrative purposes only and does not constitute an endorsement by the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. Government.
ItemOpen Access
Optimizing Cybersecurity Budgets with AttackSimulation
(IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security, 2022-11) Master, Alexander; Hamilton, George; Dietz, J. Eric
Modern organizations need effective ways to assess cybersecurity risk. Successful cyber attacks can result in data breaches, which may inflict significant loss of money, time, and public trust. Small businesses and non-profit organizations have limited resources to invest in cybersecurity controls and often do not have the in-house expertise to assess their risk. Cyber threat actors also vary in sophistication, motivation, and effectiveness. This paper builds on the previous work of Lerums et al., who presented an AnyLogic model for simulating aspects of a cyber attack and the efficacy of controls in a generic enterprise network. This paper argues that their model is an effective quantitative means of measuring the probability of success of a threat actor and implements two primary changes to increase the model's accuracy. First, the authors modified the model's inputs, allowing users to select threat actors based on the organization's specific threat model. Threat actor effectiveness is evaluated based on publicly available breach data (in addition to security control efficacy), resulting in further refined attack success probabilities. Second, all three elements - threat effectiveness, control efficacy, and model variance - are computed and evaluated at each node to increase the estimation fidelity in place of pooled variance calculations. Visualization graphs, multiple simulation runs (up to 1 million), attack path customization, and code efficiency changes are also implemented. The result is a simulation tool that provides valuable insight to decision-makers and practitioners about where to most efficiently invest resources in their computing environment to increase cybersecurity posture. AttackSimulation and its source code are freely available on GitHub.
ItemOpen Access
Death by a Thousand Cuts: Commercial Data Risks to the Army
(Army Cyber Institute, 2023-12) Fox, Jaclyn; Master, Alexander; Starck, Nicolas; Dawson, Jessica
This report outlines the force protection challenges related to publicly available information (PAI), and specifically highlights commercial data exposed through data brokers. The rapid, widespread, and low-cost availability of data about personnel poses significant operations security (OPSEC) and force protection vulnerabilities for the Army. The recommendations for action included in this report emphasize organizational mitigation actions, as opposed to individual training or national-level policy changes. These are actions that the Army can implement with existing authorities – in absence of federal data privacy legislation or DoD directive – to protect the force while preserving the civil liberties and privacy of its members. While many of the analytic technologies outlined in this report are touted as the Industry standard for marketing, they are widely viewed as invasive by privacy and civil liberties experts – while granting users little transparency or control over what data is collected about them.
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A Worldwide View of Nation-state Internet Censorship
(Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI), 2023) Master, Alexander; Garman, Christina
Nation-states impose various levels of censorship on their Internet communications. As access to Internet resources has grown among the global population, some governments have demonstrated an increased willingness to filter content, throttle connections, or deny access to Internet resources within their sphere of influence. Researchers, policymakers, and civil liberty advocates need an understanding of the technical means that Internet censors implement. This work presents a worldwide view of nation-state Internet censorship derived from Internet measurement data and prior research. We performed a cross-sectional study of 70 countries during a one-year period, illuminating current online censorship trends. We then conducted a systematic study of prior work to illustrate if and how those same countries performed censorship over the past two decades. Our research contributions are three-fold: (1) a snapshot of current and emerging Internet censorship methods around the globe, (2) a holistic view of changes in censorship trends over the past two decades as the Internet has become a primary means of human communication, and (3) a research framework to allow for ease of continual analysis.