Implementation of a Multilevel Wiki for Cross-Domain Collaboration

The pace of modern warfare requires tools that support intensive, ongoing collaboration between participants. Wiki technology provides a hypertext content-based collaborative authoring and information sharing environment that includes the ability to create links to other web contents, relative stability, ease of use, and logging features for tracking contributions and modifications. Military environments impose a requirement to enforce national policies regarding authorized access to classified information while satisfying the intent of wikis to provide an open context for content sharing. The Global Information Grid GIG vision calls for a highly flexible multilevel environment. The Monterey Security Architecture MYSEA Test-bed provides a distributed high assurance multilevel networking environment where authenticated users securely access data and services at different classification levels. The MYSEA approach is to provide users with unmodified commercial-off-the-shelf office productivity tools while enforcing a multilevel security MLS policy with high assurance. The extensible Test-bed architecture is designed with strategically placed trusted components that comprise the distributed TCB, while untrusted commercial clients support the user interface. We have extended the collaboration capabilities of MYSEA through the creation of a multilevel wiki. This wiki permits users who access the system at a particular sensitivity level to read and post information to the wiki at that level. Users at higher sensitivity levels may read wiki content at lower security levels and may post information at the higher security level. The underlying MLS policy enforcement mechanisms prevent low users from accessing higher sensitivity information. The multilevel wiki was created by porting a publicly available wiki engine to run on the high assurance system hosting the MYSEA server. A systematic process was used to select a wiki for the MYSEA environment. TWiki was chosen.