SEI Solutions That Improve the DoD's Cyber Mission Readiness
Created March 2025
The Cyber Mission Readiness team at the SEI develops software tools and methodologies for conducting high-quality cyber experimentation and exercises for the Department of Defense (DoD) and beyond. The DoD and others use these tools to create more robust and realistic environments as part of high-end team exercises. These SEI tools help DoD departments and agencies fill knowledge gaps, assess and evaluate cyber operations, and prepare cyber teams to perform at the highest levels. Over the past decade, SEI tools have enabled both large-scale and small-scale U.S. DoD cyber exercises that help combat global cyber threats by developing cyber talent.
Mission Readiness Challenges
Cyber team exercises enable the DoD to experience close to real-world scenarios. This approach helps the DoD prepare its cyber teams to respond effectively to new and evolving cyber threats. Creating an isolated simulation environment is important to avoid exposing live networks to malicious traffic.
Simulated environments, however, don’t always offer quality exercise experiences because they can lack details that cyber operators would see in operational networks. When exercise environments aren’t realistic enough, the experience can fail to give cyber teams the competitive edge they need for mission success.
Tools That Improve Cyber Performance
Using SEI tools, the DoD produces highly realistic simulations that make exercising more effective and improves the performance of cyber teams. SEI tools deliver hands-on cyber experience building using network nodes and traffic within attack and defend scenarios. Real traffic and effects put cyberteams in challenging situations so they can learn how to carry out effective responses to cyber events under stressful conditions.
To broaden the availability of these tools, the SEI makes many of them freely and publicly available to the broader cybersecurity community. The collection of tools below includes links to the software and associated documentation.
The SEI continues to partner with others on developing new tools that can take cyber team exercises to the next level by integrating open source generative artificial intelligence capabilities. For more information about other upcoming tools, join our mailing list.
Software and Tools
CWD Tools for Improving Cyber Simulations
Download the open source software tools that the SEI developed to create realistic cyber simulations or access information to learn more about each one.
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Simulating Realistic Human Activity Using Large Language Model Directives
•Technical Report
The authors explore how activities generated from the GHOSTS Framework’s NPC client compare to activities produced by GHOSTS’ default behavior and LLMs.
ReadML-Driven Decision-Making in Realistic Cyber Exercises
•Podcast
Thomas Podnar and Dustin Updyke discuss efforts by the SEI CERT Division to apply machine learning to increase the realism of non-player characters (NPCs) in cyber training exercises.
ListenUsing Machine Learning to Increase the Fidelity of Non-Player Characters in Training Simulations
•Blog Post
Use of machine-learning (ML) modeling and a suite of software tools to create decision-making preferences that make non-player characters (NPCs) more realistic in simulations.
READ