XDDS: A scalable guard-agnostic cross domain discovery service

As both the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community are moving toward service-oriented architecture (SOA), it is important to ensure that SOA-based systems can operate and exchange classified information across domain boundaries in support of support net-centric missions. The interplay between SOA and cross domain solutions (CDS) raise a number of challenges that are grounded in the inherent mismatch between core SOA principles, such as loose coupling, composabil-ity, and discoverability, and current CDS technologies and certification and accreditation processes in use today. The Cross Domain Discovery Service (XDDS) described in this paper describes an architecture and design for extending service discovery, a core SOA functionality, across domain boundaries. The resulting services and protocols provide access to service information across security domains in a secure, guard-agnostic, scalable, and flexible way that is amenable to certification and accreditation.