High Assurance Multilevel Services For Off-The-Shelf Workstation Applications
Jason X. Hackerson, Cynthia E. Irvine, Dion A. Robb, James P. Anderson · Calhoun: The Naval Postgraduate School Institutional Archive (Naval Postgraduate School) · 1998
The need for multilevel secure (MLS) systems still exists yet, the popularity of desktop systems has resulted in the imposition of new requirements. To be useful, a system must employ commercialoff -the-shelf (COTS) operating systems and office productivity software. We describe the preliminary architecture for a COTS-driven local area network that will provide MLS services to users while permitting them to employ standard office productivity tools on standard workstations. Our ongoing development centers on the provision of multilevel mail and messaging to the desktop. 1. Introduction The problem of timely access to information at multiple security levels has challenged the computer security research and engineering community for several decades. During the 1960s and 1970s attention was focussed on the development of high assurance security kernels by vendors. The resulting systems permit controlled sharing of sensitive information by users at multiple security levels. Often t...