The Releasable Data Products Framework

Future warfare will operate at an increased tempo that is driven and sustained by an ever-expanding inventory of data driven weapons. The dataflow itself could be a bottleneck, particularly where U.S. intelligence assets and facilities must share information with multinational coalitions. The bottleneck could be reduced by replacing the difficult manual check at the time of release with many simpler and mostly automated checks that are scattered throughout the data production process. However conventional release processes, which are implemented using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) systems, are susceptible to malicious code that could easily subvert these checks. This paper describes the Releasable Data Products Framework (RDPF), a collection of building blocks that when augmented with COTS release systems, can protect the data production process and can provide the release officer with assurance that only those data produced in an approved and secure manner are released