Security issues in High Level Architecture based distributed simulation

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has, over the past several years, emphasized the need to employ simulation based acquisition (SBA) in engineering and development. Distributed simulation introduces an information assurance challenge and details of a simulation must be guarded from unauthorized access. The High Level Architecture (HLA) and its run-time interface (RTI) do not define support of mandatory access controls (MACs) or discretionary access controls (DACs) required to provide necessary protection levels. We review of some current MLS approaches for HLA/RTI simulations to illustrate the deficient multi-level secure (MLS) components in HLA and present options for a secure HLA interface built at the network layer. An initial implementation of a proposed solution is presented. We discuss experimental results, limitations of our implementation and future research directions