Effects of multilevel security on real-time applications

This paper presents a brief overview of a notional airborne application scenario that requires both multilevel security and real-time processing. It was used to guide decisions related to formation of the security policy interpretation, the operating system interface, and the system services design for a multilevel secure real-time distributed operating system (MLS RT DOS) called Secure Alpha. We compare secure and nonsecure application designs for the scenario to assess the effects of MLS RT DOS security features on the structure of the application. The comparison reveals that the security features make real-time scheduling and the construction of robust applications more difficult for this scenario.<
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