Defense Information Infrastructure Research Articles

1.2.1 Engineering Information Assurance for Critical Infrastructures: The DITSCAP Automation Study

AbstractRecent advances in information technology have transformed the way in which mission‐critical services get delivered and are evaluated today. These services are heavily and increasingly relying on an interdependent crossed network of critical information infrastructures, spanning from private to government sectors. In order to enable such infrastructures to efficiently mitigate risks, optimize their security posture and evaluate their information assurance (IA) practices, we identify the need for a structured and comprehensive methodology for IA‐aware critical infrastructure protection. In this paper, we focus on the automation study of the Department of Defense Information Technology Security Certification and Accreditation Process (DITSCAP) that is a standard for certifying and accrediting the information networks that comprise of the Defense Information Infrastructure (DII). We attempt to generalize a course of actions in DITSCAP that motivate our design principles and modeling techniques, supported by their theoretical backgrounds and demonstrable prototype interfaces to establish their appropriateness.

Establishing trustworthiness in services of the critical infrastructure through certification and accreditation

Trustworthiness in services provided by the Critical Infrastructure (CI) is essentially dependent on the quality of underlying software, systems, practice and environment, as which the software information infrastructures are becoming increasingly a major component of business, industry, government and defense. The level of trustworthiness required from services that are operational in such critical software information infrastructures is often established based on standardized infrastructure-wide evaluation criteria - Certification and Accreditation (C&A) - through the identification of operational risks and the determination of conformance with established security standards and best practices. In order to effectively establish such levels of trustworthiness for services in the CI, we identify the need for a structured and comprehensive C&A framework with appropriate tool support that combines its theoretical and practical aspects. In this paper, we present our efforts in developing such a framework that leverages novel techniques from software requirements engineering and knowledge engineering to support the automation of the Department of Defense Information Technology Security Certification and Accreditation Process (DITSCAP), which is a standard for certifying and accrediting the information networks that support the Defense Information Infrastructure (DII). Through the examples derived from our case study, we further motivate the applicability and appropriateness of our framework.

Common object request broker architecture (CORBA)-based security services for the virtual radiology environment.

The US Army Great Plains Regional Medical Command (GPRMC) has a requirement to conform to Department of Defense (DoD) and Army security policies for the Virtual Radiology Environment (VRE) Project. Within the DoD, security policy is defined as the set of laws, rules, and practices that regulate how an organization manages, protects, and distributes sensitive information. Security policy in the DoD is described by the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC), Army Regulation (AR) 380-19, Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment (DII COE), Military Health Services System Automated Information Systems Security Policy Manual, and National Computer Security Center-TG-005, "Trusted Network Interpretation." These documents were used to develop a security policy that defines information protection requirements that are made with respect to those laws, rules, and practices that are required to protect the information stored and processed in the VRE Project. The goal of the security policy is to provide for a C2-level of information protection while also satisfying the functional needs of the GPRMC's user community. This report summarizes the security policy for the VRE and defines the CORBA security services that satisfy the policy. In the VRE, the information to be protected is embedded into three major information components: (1) Patient information consists of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM)-formatted fields. The patient information resides in the digital imaging network picture archiving and communication system (DIN-PACS) networks in the database archive systems and includes (a) patient demographics; (b) patient images from x-ray, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasound (US); and (c) prior patient images and related patient history. (2) Meta-Manager information to be protected consists of several data objects. This information is distributed to the Meta-Manager nodes and includes (a) radiologist schedules; (b) modality worklists; (c) routed case information; (d) DIN-PACS and Composite Health Care system (CHCS) messages, and Meta-Manager administrative and security information; and (e) patient case information. (3) Access control and communications security is required in the VRE to control who uses the VRE and Meta-Manager facilities and to secure the messages between VRE components. The CORBA Security Service Specification version 1.5 is designed to allow up to TCSEC's B2-level security for distributed objects. The CORBA Security Service Specification defines the functionality of several security features: identification and authentication, authorization and access control, security auditing, communication security, nonrepudiation, and security administration. This report describes the enhanced security features for the VRE and their implementation using commercial CORBA Security Service software products.