The Pump: A Decade of Covert Fun

This paper traces the ten plus year history of the Naval Research Laboratory's Pump idea. The Pump was theorized, designed, and built at the Naval Research Laboratory's Center for High Assurance Computer Systems. The reason for the Pump is the need to send messages from a Low enclave to a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kang, Myong H, Moskowitz, Ira S, Chincheck, Stanley
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
COMMUNICATIONS PROTOCOLS
Computer Hardware
Computer Programming and Software
Computer Systems Management and Standards
COVERT CHANNELS
DATA TRANSMISSION SECURITY
DESIGN CRITERIA
HIGH RELIABILITY
INFORMATION ASSURANCE
LESSONS LEARNED
NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
NETWORK PUMP
ONE-WAY DATA DIODES
SYMPOSIA
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
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Summary:This paper traces the ten plus year history of the Naval Research Laboratory's Pump idea. The Pump was theorized, designed, and built at the Naval Research Laboratory's Center for High Assurance Computer Systems. The reason for the Pump is the need to send messages from a Low enclave to a High enclave, in a secure and reliable manner. In particular, the Pump was designed to minimize the covert channel threat from the necessary message acknowledgements, without penalizing system performance and reliability. We review the need for the Pump, the design of the Pump, the variants of the Pump, and the current status of the Pump, along with manufacturing and certification difficulties. Presented at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (21st) held in Tucson, AZ on 5-9 Dec 2005 and published in proceedings of the same, p318-325. The original document contains color images.