Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

370 Military Communications and Information Technology...
is more difficult in the context of the “NATO as an Alliance” scenario, implying
operations across governance realms. Apart from standard technical
solution and internally developed procedures, it is necessary to develop
templates for business agreements and processes for cross-domain forensic
measures in order to facilitate auditing and ensure that investigative authorities
have access to necessary information and can correlate information
across domains as part of a detective control or for incident response.
F. Trust relationships
This decision point should determine the terms on which a domain may
establish federations with partners. Depending on the federation scenario, trust
relationships require agreements at a subset or at all the three levels as follows:
• technical, proving technical framework of security specifications that can be
derived from specifications defined in operational security,
• business, describing functional aspects derived from the business case
of the federation as well as the governance framework,
• legal, proving the legal framework for the federation.
Detailed analysis of the business and legal aspects are out of scope of this investigation.
They seem, however, to be more relevant in the context of the “NATO
as an Alliance” scenario. Specific regulations should address at least:
• purpose of the federation,
• required assurance levels,
• use cases,
• required security practices,
• identity data usage limitations,
• audit or assessment criteria for compliance with the federation regulations.
Compliance validation with the federation rules is addressed in section H.
G. Authorization and attribution
This decision point is aimed to provide an answer to the following questions:
• What attributes are going to be used for authorization decisions
• How should attributes be exchanged between domains
1) Federated authorization position:
The current approach in NATO for authorization services is either to rely
on Microsoft Active Directory (AD) capabilities or to utilize application specific
authorization modules. As a result, NATO has to deal with highly decentralized
(and often internally incoherent) policy infrastructures. It does not seem to be
possible to easily change this approach. However, the upcoming service-oriented
business processing pattern in NATO will pose new security challenges. Therefore,