SMASHUP: A Formal Framework for Secure Mashups

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 a Department of Defense (DoD) environment 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 validity, provenance, integrity, and usage control over the manner in which mashups are performed, 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 data units will be wrapped in policies that will provide rules over the manner in which information is collected, aggregated, and rendered in different environments. BENEFIT: The anticipated benefits resulting from this project to provide 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.