UNCLASSIFIED/UNLIMITED UNCLASSIFIED/UNLIMITED Achieving Cross-Domain Collaboration in Heterogeneous Environments

The military community relies on chat and Instant Message (IM) technologies for planning operations and near real-time collaboration. For all of the strengths of chat/IM technologies, they do not lend themselves well to use within conventional cross-domain communications architectures. The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has developed a portable, hybrid architecture that introduces multilevel security (MLS) technologies into environments comprised of multiple security levels (MSL). This architecture was then used as the framework for integrating various software systems into an enabling capability for cross-domain chat. The resultant multilevel chat system utilizes various trusted mechanisms to maintain strong process separation, privilege management, and communications interface control. This multilevel chat system was then used in a limited operational experiment (LOE) to enable users in disparate security domains to collaborate with each other based on a pre-defined, tested, and approved system security policy. Efforts are currently underway to develop a certification profile for this system, as well as for the system’s hybrid multilevel architecture. We hope to determine the scalability of this architecture through future operational test scenarios. We are also investigating the scope of the solution set to which this architecture may apply, including multilevel web services