2.4: Information Assurance and Sharing

Information Assurance and Sharing

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A primary function of cyber infrastructure is to provide for the safe, secure creation, transmission, storage, and retrieval of all kinds of digital information – including sensitive data belonging to individuals, private-sector organizations, and government. Ideally, both the creator and any recipients or viewers of nonpublic digital information should be authorized and should be able to access it securely; identify its origin and history, or provenance; authenticate its integrity (no one has tampered with the content); and maintain its confidentiality as required. The information assurance field looks at cybersecurity specifically from the perspective of what is required to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of data. Where we are now: Current concerns in information assurance range from protecting the bits themselves through guarding the larger digital environments in which they reside. Technical areas include security governance and privacy policies; network and system access controls (administrative, logical, physical), identity authentication, management, and non-repudiation technologies and policies; cryptographic techniques for data encryption and decryption; and forensic capabilities for identifying security breaches. In highly sensitive information environments such as DoD, “mission assurance” also employs risk analysis and management tools to analyze and mitigate the security risks of environments in which information is shared across multiple security levels. Today, encryption techniques provide the only data-based direct means of preventing unauthorized persons from obtaining access to digital data. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) exemplifies the approach of creating a trusted multi-domain network environment, but PKI has been slow to achieve widespread adoption because it is costly and cumbersome to administer. Research needs: The same characteristics of complex enterprises that enable network and information managers to institute access controls and security monitoring – large-scale system homogeneity, static configuration, and software monoculture – also make it easier for cyber attackers to access, tamper with, or destroy information. To realize the NITRD vision, research must seek fundamental advances in hardware, software, and network architectures that can provide immunity from tampering and attacks, possibly by identifying and actively defeating them or increasing system diversity. Likewise, next-generation approaches are needed for securing digital information itself. Exploration of such techniques as homomorphic encryption, for example, may lead the way to data formats that are intrinsically encoded but still usable in controlled environments.

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