Implementation of a Multilevel Wiki for Cross-Domain Collaboration

Abstract: The pace of modern warfare requires tools that support intensive, ongoing collaboration between participants. Wiki technology provides a hypertext content-based collaborative authoring and information sharing environment that includes the ability to create links to other web contents, relative stability, ease of use, and logging features for tracking contributions and modifications. Military environments impose a requirement to enforce national policies regarding authorized access to classified information while satisfying the intent of wikis to provide an open context for content sharing. The Global Information Grid (GIG) vision calls for a highly flexible multilevel environment. The Blinded Security Architecture (BLSEA) Test-bed provides a distributed high assurance multilevel networking environment where authenticated users securely access data and services at different classification levels. The BLSEA approach is to provide users with unmodified commercial-off-the-shelf office productivity tools while enforcing a multilevel security (MLS) policy with high assurance. The extensible Test-bed architecture is designed with strategically placed trusted components that comprise the distributed TCB, while untrusted commercial clients support the user interface. We have extended the collaboration capabilities of BLSEA through the creation of a multilevel wiki. This wiki permits users who access the system at a particular sensitivity level to read and post information t