Integrity and Authentication of Real-Time Data in Navy Combat Systems

Existing Information Assurance (IA) technologies in use by the Navy for near real-time and deadline-scheduled data are constrained by significant endpoint dependencies, such as proprietary hardware, pre-shared keys, and administrative configuration. The goal of the proposed project is to provide an enhanced IA suite capable of meeting authentication, integrity, provenance, and confidentiality requirements, particularly for near real-time and deadline scheduled data, in a decentralized, heterogeneous, dynamic-topology publication/subscription architecture, based on the Object Management Group"s Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard. The successful design and implementation of a real-time capable Information Assurance framework for DDS will provide interoperability with key standards required by the Department of Defense's Net Centric Warfare objectives, leverage existing open standards and open source software, and ultimately result in a cost-effective, dual-use commercial product. Achieving this objective will enable secure, authenticated interconnectivity among potentially thousands of publish/subscribe participants, and greatly accelerate achievement of the DoD"s Joint Vision 2020 objectives. Concentris will leverage our experience building publish-subscribe distributed systems, and our current SBIR-funded work on a Distributed Services Framework for DDS, to develop a solution we call TRIADS: Total Real-time Information Assurance for DDS.