Optics for Information Assurance on Platforms

We will outline and assess future optical LAN infrastructure approaches that can use optics to enable multi-independent level security (MILS) systems on mobile platforms with improved size, weight, and power (Swap) and a 1000-fold increased throughput over traditional system approaches. Although we will focus on the role of optics to support secure optical communications, this comprises only one of several "independent" conceptual layers of separation that includes applications, middleware, separation kernels, partitioning communication systems, network interfaces, memory, and peripheral hardware. We will contrast the degree of confidentiality supported by optics with traditional security schemes and show their impact on the MILS system architecture.