ObjectSecurity, the leading solutions provider for centralised security management and middleware security in mission-critical industries such as air traffic control, announced today that it has delivered an air traffic control proof-of-concept to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).
The demo is built on top of NRL’s survivable SINS middleware for mission-critical deployments (both in defence and civilian environments). The simulated data feeds include plane transponders, radars and an SNET collision detection system.
It showcases the usefulness of various SINS features, in particular the preservation of global shared state across the entire distributed system. In the demo, SINS ensures that a minimum safety distance between aircraft is always maintained throughout all nodes of the distributed system.
This pilot project proved that SINS is a viable and useful application development and integration platform, both for tactical defence networks and critical civilian infrastructure such as air traffic management. In particular, it is the only middleware technology available today that supports application development with built-in system-wide safety. Another important feature is survivability, which means that the distributed application can recover from loss of individual nodes. This is a critical requirement for net-centric defence infrastructure.
The deliverable also includes an analysis of the features and requirements for SINS, as well as a roadmap to complete SINS and bring it to a certified, ready-to-market state. In particular, ObjectSecurity proposes to integrate SINS with two other technologies in order to reduce the complexity of application development and management in critical distributed systems:
A model-driven software engineering tool chain similar to the SecureMiddleware MDA tool chain. Such a tool chain will greatly simplify the development of safe, secure, and survivable distributed applications and prevent many programming errors – www.securemiddleware.org
A central security/safety/QoS policy management service similar to ObjectSecurity’s OpenPMF. This feature-rich central security manager simplifies policy specification and maintenance, and prevents many policy errors. It also supports central monitoring of relevant activities in the system – www.openpmf.org
As a significant benefit of this approach, ObjectSecurity envisions that a large part of the policies can be automatically generated from the application models. This further reduces the complexity of policy management and prevents many risks caused by incorrectly specified policies.
According to NRL’s Dr. Ramesh Bharadwaj, who is responsible for the SINS project, NRL intends to pursue their collaboration with ObjectSecurity further as part of their planned SINS commercialisation strategy with ObjectSecurity.