SMASHUP: Secure mashup for defense transformation and net-centric systems

The recent development of mashup technologies now enables users to easily collect, integrate, and display data from a vast array of different information sources available on the Internet. The ability to harness and leverage information in this manner provides a powerful means for discovering links between information, and greatly enhances decisionmaking capabilities. The availability of such services in DoD environments will provide tremendous advantages to the decision-makers engaged in analysis of critical situations, rapid-response, and long-term planning scenarios. However in the absence of mechanisms for managing the usage of resources, any mashup service in a DoD environment also opens up significant security vulnerabilities to insider threat and accidental leakage of confidential information, not to mention other security threats. In this paper we describe the development of a framework that will allow integration via mashups of content from various data sources in a secure manner. The framework is based on mathematical logic where addressable resources have formal usage terms applied to them, and these terms are used to specify and enforce usage policies over the resources. An advantage of this approach is it provides a formal means for securely managing the usage of resources that might exist within multilevel security environments.