SECURE MAIL & EDI TECHNOLOGIES FOR INTEROPERABLE DEFENSE

New principles of secure mail and EDI technologies will be investigated by adding high assurance information security (INFOSEC) mechanisms to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) non-secure mail and EDI products. The innovation is to develop an incremental building methodology merging the rigous high assurance defense INFOSEC technologies addressing malicious insider and software attacks and the COTS mail and EDI products which are mostly developed for functionalities and productivities. Differences between defense INFOSEC and commercial INFOSEC will be identified first to guide the transfer of defense technologies to commercial applications and the development of interoperability among defense and commercial mails and EDIs. The secure mail and EDI development will be guided also by three evaluation criteria: DoD Rainbow Series, emerging Federal and Common criteria (ECSR for commercial security and LP4). New cryptographic sealing techniques based on private and public key encryptions will be investigated to provide new mechanisms for indicating the sensitivity of thos inofrmation which have no "sensitivity labels". THe allocation of INFORSEC mechanisms will be investigated for different components of the secure mail and EDI systems: user agents, mail-transfer agents, directory service agents and mail store, etc. The architecture of a piot system will be demonstrated which include commercial end-users, system integrators and INFOSEC providers.