Unifying the secure DoD network public ATM network infrastructure

摘要

The desire to transport classified traffic securely utilizing the current network security paradigm has led the US department of defense (DoD) to maintain its own, isolated network, distinct from the public ATM network infrastructure. Internally,the DoD maintains four completely separate and isolated networks to carry top-secret, secret, confidential, and unclassified traffic, respectively. A public ATM network may be viewed as carrying unclassified or non-secure traffic. While the cost ofmaintaining four separate networks is becoming increasingly prohibitive to the DoD, the inability of the public and DoD to utilize each other's network resources runs counter to the current atmosphere of dual use and economies of scale. This paperintroduces the concept of a "mixed use" network, wherein the four DoD networks and the public ATM network are coalesced into a single, unified network that transports all four types of traffic, efficiently and without compromising their respectivesecurity. In "mixed use," the ATM nodes and links that are common between the DoD and public networks are labeled "joint use" and fall under the jurisdiction of the military for obvious protection of the security assets. The concept of mixed use is thedirect result of the user-level, security on demand principle that is enabled by the fundamental security framework and the basic characteristic of ATM networks. This paper models a representative 32-node public ATM network, a 40-node DoD network, and the coalesced 50-node "mixed use" network, and executes accurate simulations on a testbed that, in turn, executes on a network of linux workstations configured as a loosely-coupled parallel processor. The simulation testbed closely resembles an operationalATM network, thereby implying realistic results. Performance data, obtained for representative input traffic stimulus, constitute a successful scientific demonstration of the concept of "mixed use" network. Furthermore, the results reveal that because the unclassified DoD traffic encounters a richer connectivity in the "mixed use" network, the success rate of the DoD calls is significantly higher in the "mixed use" network than in the military network. The unclassified DoD traffic's demand for securityresources decreases thereby enabling a much higher chance for the secure calls to succeed.