Secure middleware for situation-aware naval C/sup 2/ and combat systems

There is an increasing need within the Navy & Marine Corps for building distributed situation-aware applications that are rapidly reconfigurable and survivable in the face of attacks and changing mission needs. For the Navy's vision of Network Centric Warfare and Total Ship Computing to succeed, there is an urgent need for a secure, robust, and survivable network infrastructure for disseminating mission-critical information in a timely manner. It is widely believed that intelligent software agents provide the ability to build robust, agile, and efficient distributed applications. We outline how SINS (Secure Infrastructure for Networked Systems) being developed at the Naval Research Laboratory will provide commanders and warfighters the necessary middleware for constructing situation-aware Command and Control (C/sup 2/) and combat applications. We pay particular attention to the correctness, survivability, and efficiency of the underlying middleware architecture, and develop a middleware definition language SOL (Secure Operations Language) that enables C/sup 2/ and Combat applications to use this infrastructure in a seamless and scalable manner.