The Pump: A Decade of Covert Fun

Abstract

This paper traces the ten plus year history of the Naval Research Laboratory's Pump idea. The Pump was theorized, designed, and built at the Naval Research Laboratory's Center for High Assurance Computer Systems. The reason for the Pump is the need to send messages from a "Low" enclave to a "High" enclave, in a secure and reliable manner. In particular, the Pump was designed to minimize the covert channel threat from the necessary message acknowledgements, without penalizing system performance and reliability. We review the need for the Pump, the design of the Pump, the variants of the Pump, and the current status of the Pump, along with manufacturing and certification difficulties.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2005
Accession Number
ADA462184

Entities

People

  • Ira S. Moskowitz
  • Myong H. Kang
  • Stanley Chincheck

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Application Software
  • Channel Capacity
  • Communication Channels
  • Computer Network Security
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Cybersecurity
  • Data Transmission
  • Databases
  • Denial Of Service Attack
  • Engineering
  • Information Operations
  • Local Area Networks
  • Networks
  • Reliability

Readers

  • Electrical Engineering
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Tactical Satellite Communications Systems Engineering.