SMASHUP: A Formal Framework for Secure Mashups

ABSTRACT: The recent development of mashup technologies now enables users to easily collect, integrate, and display data from a vast array of different information sources available on the Internet. The ability to harness and leverage information in this manner provides a powerful means for discovering links between information, and greatly enhances decision-making capabilities. The availability of such services in DoD environments will provide tremendous advantages to the decision-makers engaged in analysis of critical situations, rapid-response, and long-term planning scenarios. However in the absence of mechanisms for managing the usage of resources, any mashup service in a DoD environment also opens up significant security vulnerabilities to insider threat and accidental leakage of confidential information, just to name a few. In this research project, we will develop a framework that will allow integration via mashups of content from various data sources in a secure manner. The framework will be based on mathematical logic by means of which addressable resources have formal usage terms applied to them, and these terms are used to specify and enforce usage policies over the resources. An advantage of this approach is it provides a formal means for controlling the usage of resources within highly complex secure mashups. BENEFIT: The anticipated benefits resulting from this project, which involves providing an end user computing environment that allows Warfighters to aggregate content from multiple DoD sources using Web 2.0 technologies in a provably assured manner, are: (a) helps prevent security vulnerabilities such as insider threat and accidental leakage of confidential information; (b) overcomes obstacles to access of wider-ranging data sources and feeds; (c) extends the reach of legacy services (i.e., Net-Centric Data Strategy); and (d) helps users securely solve new problems"on the fly."The potential to apply this work to commercial opportunities is easy to see. The framework is applicable in any end user computing environment where mashups are needed. Therefore much of our work in secure mashups should translate naturally to commercial settings.