Migrating a commercial-off-the-shelf application to a multilevel secure environment

As the number of vendors offering multilevel secure (MLS) operating systems has grown, there have been a corresponding increase in the number of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications that are designed to incorporate MLS, particularly database management systems (DBMS). However, most existing DBMS applications were designed for non-MLS environments. End users have been reluctant to move to MLS applications due to the perceived difficulties of migrating from a non-MLS to an MLS environment, even though there is very little actual or documented experience in this process. This paper describes the migration of a production application from a non-MLS operating system to an MLS system for use in the Computer-aided Acquisition and Logistic Support (CALS) environment. The migration effort resulted in a demonstrable MLS application utilizing COTS MLS and non-MLS software. Although this paper describes the technical issues involved in the migration, many of the technical decisions were driven by non-technical factors. Therefore, in addition to describing the technical environment and actual migration, this paper discusses any technical decisions that were driven by nontechnical considerations