One of the most intractable challenges of information protection and access management is posed by highly secure environments such as those found in intelligence, law enforcement, defense and national security. These environments are often populated by coalitions whose work is also likely to be classified.
For example, the U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) comprises Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps components. It is also a coalition of countries and organizations for national defense. In addition, USSOUTHCOM has coalitions for immigration control and drug interdiction, involving agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Secure Sentient: Protecting Sensitive Information While Enabling Collaboration
Until recently, maintaining security compartmentalization without impeding collaboration has been a major difficulty for coalitions working in the same immediate area. To reconcile these contradictory requirements, an environment is needed where people with a range of security clearances can move around and work together without jeopardizing classified information or assets.
Technology, it was hoped, would solve the problem: Biometrics would allow identification of each person within a secure space. That information would be integrated with security clearances. Cameras and video analytics would track people as they moved around the space. Combining this data in real time would, in theory, allow information and assets to be compartmented and protected selectively. Several technology companies have attempted to create this kind of actively sensing, reactive space for a U.S. intelligence agency. Only CSC has succeeded in doing so. A Little Like Science Fiction The prototype Secure Sentient Environment (SSE) is running at CSC’s Maryland Intelligence Center. The SSE covers a 500 square-foot room where sensors feed information, images and interaction data to a central application that combines the data to create a real-time analysis of assets, individuals, portals, classification and clearance. The SSE enables this room — the “secure facility” — to monitor and actively protect itself, thanks to the fusion of biometrics (iris and facial scanning) with video motion.
Such self-protection is enabled by a set of rules that the SSE uses to protect sensitive data display and interrogate individuals seeking access to secure facilities.
Perhaps the most interesting capability of SSE is demonstrated by what the system does with the data it gathers: Rather than just logging or alarming, SSE actively sanitizes computer monitors when the wrong people approach secure workstations. The system also sanitizes the monitor if an authorized user walks away from a secure workstation. Robust Technology, a Wide Range of Applications Since the prototype SSE was set up, more than 100 government officials, technologists and others from the U.S. intelligence, military and commercial industry have participated in demonstrations of the system hosted by CSC. Part of the value of the SSE solution is that CSC can customize SSE for different uses.
For example, the military wants to make SSE small enough to fit in a G2 tent — a small and mobile secure environment. The intelligence community wants to make it larger, so that SSE can work in a facility. Manufacturing and commercial environments seek to leverage SSE for a very different purpose — to oversee the interplay of people, assets and production elements.
CSC is currently porting SSE from Microsoft Windows XP to the Trusted Solaris Operating System. This will put the technology on a more robust and secure platform that can be piloted and implemented in intelligence, defense and commercial facilities. The new operating system will also upgrade the technologies in SSE to be more powerful, accurate and scalable in a smaller footprint.
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