XMLSPIF Used to “Notable” Effect During CWID 2010.

CWID, the Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration, is the premier annual event that enables U.S. Combatant Commands, national civil authorities and the international community to investigate and assess command and control (C2), communications systems, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) solutions.

One of the “notable interoperability highlights” identified in this year’s Final Report is that a CWID 2010 trial:

“Demonstrated a potential cross-domain solution to e-mail services, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) chat services, web services, and document sharing all of which were governed by a common security policy based on open standards to meet the requirements for providing a network enabled capability.”

This refers to a trial run by the UK to demonstrate Cross Domain Chat between the UK, USĀ and NATO. The trial adopted the XMLSPIF schema in order to provide a revisable, extensible schema that could support widespread adoption. The UK were able to represent the US and NATO Security Labelling policies with this standard and hence define the equivalent security labels to support mapping of labels within Cross Domain Services. The UK SPIF was stored in the X.500 / LDAP Enterprise Directory and a number of services then retrieved the SPIF, via LDAP, in order to display and apply Security Labels, and also make Access Control Decisions.

Appendix C of UK Cross Domain Chat Technical Report contains an XMLSPIF representing UK JSP 457 Volume 7 Electronic Labelling Services used in the trial.