Enabling Secure Interoperability Among Federated National Entities: It's a Matter of Trust

This paper discusses issues relevant to accomplishing secure data sharing among federated national entities. This is an important, timely problem particularly in the defense sector since multi-national operations have become the norm. Similarly, the commercial marketplace today is a global one, requiring the exchange of information in support of transactions on an international scale. Traditionally, federated secure information sharing has been accomplished through bi- and multi-lateral information exchange agreements that require complex, humancentric and time-intensive processes to stand up or modify. The objective vision is to support such information sharing by establishing domain functional areas, and by creating discovery metadata standards that leverage security information to filter published data sets. A concurrent requirement is that only limited degradation of pertinent information can be tolerated to sustain common understanding. While XML alone is not enough to accomplish the vision, it is a critical enabler. We point out appropriate insertion points for XML technologies in meeting federated, secure interoperability challenges, and note as yet there is no "shrink wrapped" solution.