Performance Analysis of MYSEA

The Monterey Security Architecture MYSEA provides trusted security services, allowing users to access information at different sensitivity levels at the same time. The MYSEA server enforces a mandatory access control policy to ensure that users can only access data for which they are authorized. We would like to know the consequences of the MYSEA design on the performance of the MYSEA system. In particular, have the MYSEA trusted processes introduced any design bottlenecks into the system The objective of this thesis is to analyze the performance of selected aspects of MYSEA and, when applicable, identify system performance bottlenecks. In the absence of bottlenecks, our secure system performance study can be interpreted as characterizing the cost of security in a multilevel security context. We analyze the overhead associated with MYSEA by targeting and benchmarking its components and services. We deployed the netperf tool as a MYSEA service, to observe costs associated with IPSec, the MYSEA trusted proxy and communication among servers in the MYSEA Federation. Our benchmark tests provided useful insights to the performance overhead introduced by MYSEAs design and highlighted the cost of security of selected aspects in MYSEA.