| Title | vCDS: A Virtualized Cross Domain Solution Architecture |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Authors | Daughety, Nathan, Pendleton, Marcus, Xu, Shouhuai, Njilla, Laurent, Franco, John |
| Conference Name | MILCOM 2021 - 2021 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM) |
| Date Published | nov |
| Keywords | cloud computing, composability, compositionality, Hardware, Human Behavior, information assurance, Metrics, military communication, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, security, Software, Systems architecture, Trusted Computing |
| Abstract | With the paradigm shift to cloud-based operations, reliable and secure access to and transfer of data between differing security domains has never been more essential. A Cross Domain Solution (CDS) is a guarded interface which serves to execute the secure access and/or transfer of data between isolated and/or differing security domains defined by an administrative security policy. Cross domain security requires trustworthiness at the confluence of the hardware and software components which implement a security policy. Security components must be relied upon to defend against widely encompassing threats - consider insider threats and nation state threat actors which can be both onsite and offsite threat actors - to information assurance. Current implementations of CDS systems use suboptimal Trusted Computing Bases (TCB) without any formal verification proofs, confirming the gap between blind trust and trustworthiness. Moreover, most CDSs are exclusively operated by Department of Defense agencies and are not readily available to the commercial sectors, nor are they available for independent security verification. Still, more CDSs are only usable in physically isolated environments such as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities and are inconsistent with the paradigm shift to cloud environments. Our purpose is to address the question of how trustworthiness can be implemented in a remotely deployable CDS that also supports availability and accessibility to all sectors. In this paper, we present a novel CDS system architecture which is the first to use a formally verified TCB. Additionally, our CDS model is the first of its kind to utilize a computation-isolation approach which allows our CDS to be remotely deployable for use in cloud-based solutions. |
| DOI | 10.1109/MILCOM52596.2021.9652903 |
| Citation Key | daughety_vcds_2021 |
vCDS: A Virtualized Cross Domain Solution Architecture