Cross-domain access control in a military SOA

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide the advantage of facilitating integration and information exchange between different administrative domains (e.g., within a coalition). However, in order to support this in a secure manner, cross-domain access control is required. Various solutions to this have been developed with civilian Internet applications in mind. In this paper we consider the architectural approaches (i.e., communication patterns) used by these existing solutions and find that these approaches are not suitable for use in many military systems due to differing connectivity characteristics and availability requirements. A different approach is therefore proposed in order to better fulfill the availability requirements of military applications. Furthermore, we also consider how such access control solutions can be implemented bearing in mind the assurance requirements of military security mechanisms compared to those of typical civilian applications.