Applications to Support Normal and Critical Operations in a Tactical MLS System by Yeow Cheng Ng

The ability for first responders to access sensitive and critical information during an emergency can help save lives and reduce damages. This may be information normally unavailable to first responders, due to a lack of appropriate vetting in advance or due to lack of “need-to-know.” The Transient Tactical Access to Sensitive Information (T-TASI) system employed an emergency access control policy and a scalable security system to grant extraordinary access to sensitive information. The T-TASI system allows some coordinating authority to extend (temporary, controlled) access to sensitive information to authorized first responders, during emergencies. The T-TASI system design is based on a least privilege separation kernel (LPSK) that provides the security policy enforcement underlying the ability to allow extraordinary access with transient trust. The current T-TASI system prototype, however, lacks applications demonstrating its capabilities. The motivation of this thesis is to develop applications that will better showcase the transient trust property, and to design an application development framework that will facilitate future development for the T-TASI system.