Partitioning Communications System for High Assurance Distributed Systems

The partitioning communications system (PCS) is architecture for securing distributed systems with high assurance. It provides strong authentication and trustworthy separation of data by sensitivity/safety level and by community of interest. Channel bandwidth is managed, increasing total throughput while simultaneously guaranteeing quality of service. Requirements for the PCS are derived from analysis of the threats to be countered. An overview of how the PCS works as transparent middleware enabling traditional facilities such as CORBA and DDS is also presented. The PCS provides transparent separation of data. Trustworthy separation minimizes certification risk when functions from multiple federated, stovepipe systems are integrated into a single distributed configuration to save size, weight, and power. The PCS also simplifies adoption of network-centric operations such as the global information grid