A Design Pattern for Asynchronous Web Services in Secure, Cross-Domain Information Sharing

Cross-domain information sharing is the cornerstone of joint operations. This is particularly true in the context of intelligence activities, where raw data must be collected, distributed, analyzed, validated, and annotated before any usable information product can be created. A significant barrier to rapid, efficient, and effective data distribution and analysis is the tiered, multi-domain access paradigm employed by the DOD and the Intelligence Community. This problem is significantly magnified in the context of the Service Oriented Network Centric Operations where availability and security are two pivotal, yet conflicting, objectives. Asynchronous Web Services offer a practical solution to balancing of these objectives. However, asynchronous operations are not a native component of the W3C standards [1] and while a number of commercial approaches do exist, none meet the security requirements of the highly compartmentalized DOD operations. This paper describes a design pattern that addresses many challenges of deploying web services in support of information sharing processes across heterogeneous domains.