Intrusion Detection and Response for Real-Time Distributed Naval Systems

Abstract

Information security in naval environments is becoming increasingly important with the move towards distributed engineering and computing, increased automation, and systems based on non-developmental items (NDI). Naval applications have a broad range of communication timing requirements, from tens of seconds to sub-seconds. For example, the communication between geographically dispersed operational sites may require responses in the seconds or tens of seconds range, while the communication between applications in a shipboard combat system that are responsible for targeting weapons have much more constrained timing requirements. Additionally, there are mission critical applications that have hard real-time requirements in which the reception of data outside of specific timing limits results in system failure, as well as mission critical applications with near real-time requirements that can tolerate a wider boundary of communication response times. The integration of information security services in such an environment invariably conflicts with the timing requirements of these applications. However, security services are arguably needed most in environments with the tightest communication requirements (e.g., while engaging hostile targets). NSWC-DD has begun evaluating the applicability of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in naval environments. This paper describes current security architectures of naval platforms, potential future architectures, and desirable features of an IDS that may be integrated into these architectures.