Dynamic Coalitions
The Dynamic Coalitions program objective was to develop key technologies to support the secure creation of dynamic coalitions including the necessary technologies for policy management, group communications, supporting security infrastructure services, data sharing, and joint collaboration spaces. These areas are critical for future warfighting scenarios as outlined by Joint Vision 2020, which states that future military operations will be increasingly conducted jointly, both with multiple branches of the U.S. Armed Forces and with allied and coalition forces, requiring increased levels of interoperability. Further, this effort captured recent advancements in wireless networking technologies by investigating technologies to migrate coalition information assurance tools from servers to gateway radios thus placing the functionality directly at the interface and localizing coalition policy to gateways. The most promising technologies developed under this program were tested in operationally relevant experiments with U.S. warfighters in DARPA's Partners in Experimentation program.
Program Accomplishments:
- Developed a new formalism for application level policies to accommodate new aspects of policy that do not manifest at the network layer such as access control mechanisms.
- Developed specific technology to enable multi-level network management and multi-level message passing.
- Completed the implementation of the surrogate trust negotiation architecture for supporting trust negotiation in a wireless environment.
- Completed the design and implementation of architecture for scalable trust negotiation that incorporates reusable tickets or tokens so that repetitive, heavyweight trust negotiations are not required for access to every protected resource within a security domain.
- Developed adaptors to a policy engine for a set of real networking monitoring and control technologies including: network management tools; commercial firewalls; and application specific entities such as web servers.
- Developed low-cost IP-Sec devices that could be deployed to every coalition desktop or tactical work station, providing a low-cost classified coalition networking solution.
