IA consideration of Assured Services in a transformational network centric environment

This paper will examine IA issues for the Global Information Grid (GIG) Assured Services (AS) requirements as they relate to the converged services for the warfighting community. Director of Central Intelligence Directive 6/3 (DCID 6/3) Protecting sensitive compartmented information within information systems plays an important role in defining protection levels of systems and ties directly to getting the right information in the right place at the right time to the warfighter. The assured services requirements stem from the need to utilize scarce resources within the GIG at critical times in the most effective way in support of national security, the intelligence community and the war-fighter. Information assurance (IA) enables all information and data to be available end-to-end to support any mission without delay in accordance to the sensitivity of the task. Together, AS and IA ensure data availability integrity, authentication, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. We will start with deriving the AS requirements based on DoD publically published artifacts, then provide our analysis of the IA concerns. This becomes increasingly important as more of the services are converged to IP based services. The security aspects need to consider both boundary protection and content encryption to ensure that multilevel security is accommodated and external intruders are deterred.