Design of a Message Processing System for a Multilevel Secure Environment
Abstract
The Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Navy are currently conducting an experiment to evaluate the operational use and organizational impact of a computer-aided message handling system. An important aspect of this experiment was to design a system with sufficient security controls to enable it to process messages at multiple levels of classification. An equally important aspect of the experiment was for the system to exhibit a rich user interface that was judged easy to learn and use. Herein we present the security aspects of the design for the SIGMA Message Processing System, the system chosen for the experiment. In Section 2 a description of the SIGMA Message Processing System is given. Section 3 provides background and discusses the kernel approach to multilevel security. The authors describe in Section 4 several security problems encountered in the design. Section 5 presents the design of the SIGMA message service. The additional features that the kernel must provide to support SIGMA efficiently are documented in Section 6. Finally, a summary is provided to highlight the paper's main points.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 1978
- Accession Number
- ADA134954
Entities
People
- D. R. Oestreicher
- S. R. Ames Jr.
Organizations
- MITRE Corporation