To meet the Marine Corps' need for data integrity, resilience, confidentiality, and multi-level security on hand-held devices, portable computers, and tactical servers, Grier Forensics proposes development and demonstration of Trapeze. Trapeze achieves high protection multi-level security by booting into one of a number of distinct, isolated Security Environments. Security Environments are selected at boot time and then fixed until reboot, enabling true multi-level security. Crucially, Security Environments never contain any operating system critical files. Instead, all critical files reside exclusively in a dedicated Tamper Proof Container (TPC), external to the Security Environments, which is loaded into the environment on boot. Data stored within the TPC can never be modified by any user or application, even in the presence of zero-day vulnerabilities or user privilege escalation. Trapeze uses mechanisms (including SRSS and HOLMES) to enforce data integrity; detect, block, and report any attempts to modify protected files; rapidly restore to a known good configuration; and ensure multi-level security. Using a novel architecture, Trapeze is able to achieve these protections with remarkable high performance and low overhead, including low CPU, RAM, and storage impact. Grier Forensics is experienced in development of similar technologies, and will deliver a high-performance, high-protection solution.
Benefit: Trapeze will provide protection, even in the presence of zero-day attacks, to hand-held devices, portable computers, and servers, running common operating systems on ARM and x86. It will ensure data integrity and provide resilience, confidentiality, and multi-level security, all with a very low cost in overhead. Grier Forensics will, along with our partner prime contractor, transition Trapeze Defense to Marine Corps, Navy and coalition users, and Trapeze Commercial to industry.
Keywords: Confidentiality, Confidentiality, Boot, LINUX, data integrity, Multi-level Security, Android, Resilience
