http://www.gcn.com/print/27_8/46101-1.html
By Wilson P. Dizard III
Government Computer News
04/14/08 issue
The National Security Agency is spearheading a team of intelligence
agencies and information technology vendors in an effort toward broader
use of secure multilevel workstations based on High Assurance Platform
(HAP) standards and specifications.
NSA expects this year to approve outside use of HAP systems, which
foreshadows the technology.s adoption by federal agencies that handle
unclassified data in addition to private companies and eventually
individuals, specialists in the field say.
NSA and its vendors expect to complete the technical and legal reviews
that constitute the certification and accreditation (C&A) required
before HAP systems can be cleared for use in the secret-and-below
intelligence (SABI) world. Early HAP systems have been used in the
top-secret-and-above intelligence arena for many months.
More to come
The C&A milestone will clear the first HAP release, HAP r1, for use by
the SABI community.
The release builds on earlier technology work but doesn.t include some
of its most eagerly awaited features, said Ed Hammersla, chief operating
officer at Trusted Computer Solutions.
"HAP r4 will include the cornerstones of the HAP technology," he said.
"That is due in 2012."
Hammersla said the virtual computing features in HAP can strengthen
security and provide electricity savings for agencies and companies.
"For example, companies that operate electricity grids and pipelines
have become concerned that their general business-side computers, such
as the mainframes used for accounting, could provide pathways for
insiders to drill through to the supervisory control and administration
(SCADA) systems that regulate their networks," Hammersla said.
SCADA system vulnerabilities have attracted widespread scrutiny as a
weakness that terrorists could exploit to devastating effect.
Hammersla said HAP's virtualization features and NSA's work to assure
that the platform design delivers on its potential for stronger security
could even lead to greatly upgraded household computers.
"An individual user could create a secure zone for sensitive personal
financial information while allowing less-trusted systems to access
other parts of a home computer," Hammersla said.
NSA told GCN in an e-mail response to questions that IT vendors could
reuse the pending HAP security C&A as they develop various systems that
use the platform specifications.
The HAP designs and specifications rely on shared use of features such
as those called hardware root of trust and dynamic root of trust for
measurement.
Those elements embed upgraded security features in chips and boards that
strongly resist software attacks, sources in the intelligence community
say.
The HAP standards and specifications include a mandatory trusted
platform module (TPM) to carry out essential security functions, such
as:
* Generating asymmetric keys
* Encrypting and decrypting data
* Handling the keys that TPMs sign and exchange
* Generating random numbers
* Hashing data to secure it in transit and prevent improper access
Perhaps the most advertised improvement that the HAP releases offer is
the increasingly sophisticated use of virtualization.
Intell benefits
HAP systems' use of virtualization, an approach that builds on NSA's
earlier NetTop architecture, could produce a clutch of intelligence
technology benefits, program specialists say.
For example, HAP's virtualization features are designed to:
* Reduce costs by progressively consolidating redundant systems that
now maintain security via air gap, or physically separate
networking.
* Help intelligence practitioners create domains, or secure
communities of interest focused on a particular problem, on the
fly.
* Exploit the capabilities of new chips and chipsets from Intel and
Advanced Micro Devices that promise to simplify system
architecture and embed additional security into hardware rather
than the software methods now used.
The new chip designs will improve HAP systems. integrity by facilitating
remote attestation.
This process allows computers that communicate with one another across
domains via classified networks to verify each machine's right to access
or modify data.
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