MYSEA: The Monterey Security Architecture

Abstract

Mandated requirements to share information across different sensitivity domains necessitate the design of distributed architectures to enforce information flow policies while providing protection from malicious code and attacks devised by highly motivated adversaries. The MYSEA architecture uses component security services and mechanisms to extend and inter-operate with commodity PCs, commodity client software, applications, trusted components, and legacy single level networks, providing new capabilities for composing secure, distributed multilevel secure solutions. This results in an architecture that meets two compelling requirements: first, that users have a familiar work environment, and, second, that critical mandatory security policies are enforced.

Towards Continuous Cloud Service Assurance for Critical Infrastructure IT

“…Geo-locality has been addressed by several large organizations, such as National Security Agency, ENISA, Department of Defense, Department of Education, and A4Cloud research project. The [14], [16], [18], [20], [21], [23], [26] referred to the geo-locality as as an obligatory part of a federal or local law, whereby in our case we would like to consider it as cross domain (geographical, federal, regional, administrative) issue required for assessing overall assurance. Next to our interest is the observation perspective of a system, where we wanted to investigate if the system was observed from a holistic or a homogeneous perspective.…”

“…The Monterey Security Architecture [26](MYSEA) 3 is a research project to build a robust enterprise-level architecture that provides multi-domain authentication and security policy enforcement. The MYSEA cloud consists of high-assurance servers and authentication components for security services.…”

Undermining Isolation Through Covert Channels in the Fiasco.OC Microkernel

“…The combination of mature Linux virtualization stacks, the strong isolation afforded by microkernels, which also reliably encapsulates VMs, and the excellent performance of hardware-supported VMs have led to the use of this architecture in production systems [14]. The requirement of direct access to the Fiasco.OC kernel API required a Linuxbased agent to first gain control of the L4Linux kernel 6 . We will now show that even an application lacking this ability can use the covert channel, albeit with lower bandwidth.…”

“…But often one considered other tasks, cf. [6]. A more rigorous approach -building systems on small secure kernels -has been long acknowledged both in industry, security agencies, cf.…”

Monterey security enhanced architecture project

“…Additionally, the MYSEA system supports a secure unforgeable bidirectional connection, called a trusted path, between the user and the trusted elements of the system. Several aspects of this research provide innovative advances in the state of the art for protecting multiple domains of information and for the management of security policies and security services in support of critical applications (for a discussion of related work, see [8] …”