Confidentiality Labeling Using Structured Data Types

Transition from paper to electronic form has a profound impact on how data is understood, managed and processed. While issues related to data sustainability, usability, accessibility, interoperability and integrity have already been addressed in the past, confidentiality labeling is becoming important research topic. How to protect classified data is a subject of organizational rules and technical approaches, which must provide appropriate means to manage data in uncontrolled environment and disclose information only when security requirements are meet in targeted domain. For this purpose confidentiality electronic labels are being introduced as additional sets of (security related) meta information, which supports security marking, security classification lifecycle and secure processing of data being exchanged over different security domains. Presented confidentiality labeling syntax and processing rules propose a new format for expressing confidentiality labels using the extensible markup language (XML). Proposed syntax builds on past initiatives and broadens the horizons of use of confidentiality labeling with the introduction of mechanisms for trustworthy data binding, label integrity demonstration and label change management.