Synchronization of Unique Identifiers Across Security Domains

The main thrust of the Global Force Management Data Initiative GFM DI is the standardization and exposure of force structure information across the Department of Defense DOD components. The GFM Community of Interest developed the GFM extensible markup language schema definition to facilitate the exchange of information between and within the DOD enterprise. To implement the GFM DI, each component must instantiate an Organizational Server Org Server that can provide data conforming to this published schema. Key to this data standardization effort is the ability to refer to any GFM DI element via an identifier that is unique across the enterprise, called a Force Management Identifier. This capability is being implemented using a construct called Enterprise-wide Identifiers EwID, developed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in 2001. A Web application called an EwID Enterprise Seed Server ESS manages the allocation of EwID prefixes, which Org Servers use to generate EwIDs. Maintaining a single-point control of this process assures that all EwID prefixes, and therefore EwIDs, are unique. However, for the GFM DI to be truly global, the information must be consistent across security domains. Thus, EwIDs will be unique regardless of the classification level of the associated data. The GFM DI is addressing this requirement by implementing a cross domain solution that enables a classified instance of the ESS to delegate an EwID Seed request to an unclassified instance of the ESS.