Tailored Trustworthy Spaces

Tailored Trustworthy Spaces (TTS) provide flexible, adaptive, distributed trust environments that can support functional and policy requirements arising from a wide spectrum of activities in the face of an evolving range of threats. A TTS recognizes the user’s context and evolves as the context evolves. The user chooses to accept the protections and risks of a tailored space, and the attributes of the space must be expressible in an understandable way to support informed choice and must be readily customized, negotiated and adapted.

The scientific challenge of tailored spaces is to provide the separation, isolation, policy articulation, negotiation, and requisite assurances to support specific cyber sub-spaces.

Research is required to develop:

• Trust negotiation tools and data trust models to support negotiation of policy
• Type-safe languages and application verification, tools for establishment of identity or authentication as specified by the policy
• Data protection tools, access control management, monitoring and compliance verification mechanisms to allow for informed trust of the entire transaction path
• Resource and cost analysis tools
• Hardware mechanisms that support secure bootload and continuous monitoring of critical software
• Least privilege separation kernels to ensure separation and platform trust in untrustworthy environments
• Application and operating systems elements that can provide strong assurance that the program semantics cannot be altered during execution
• Platform security mechanisms and trust-in-platform establishment