A Cautionary Note Regarding the Data Integrity Capacity of Certain Secure Systems
Cynthia E. Irvine, Timothy E. Levin · 2002
The need to provide standard commercial-grade productivity applications as the general purpose user interface to high-assurance data processing environments is compelling, and has resulted in proposals for several different types of “trusted” systems. We characterize some of these systems as a class of architecture. We discuss the general integrity property that systems can only be trusted to manage modifiable data whose integrity is at or below that of their interface components . One effect of this property is that in terms of integrity these hybrid-security systems are only applicable to processing environments where the integrity of data is consistent with that of low-assurance software. Several examples are provided of hybrid-security systems subject to these limitations.