Using NATO Labelling to Support Controlled Information Sharing between Partners

Abstract

Protection of critical infrastructure requires collaboration between various stakeholders, including military, governmental and private organizations. The stakeholders are typically located in different information security domains or even different countries. We present a content labelling solution developed by NATO for the purpose of enabling information sharing between different communities of interest and coalition participants in NATO operations. We believe that the same solution can be used to support the enforcement of fine-grained access control for the protection of critical infrastructures. The focus of this paper is on the binding of sensitivity-marking metadata (i.e. ‘labelling’) to data objects, and the application of granular access control to labelled data objects. We provide an example of how access control can be efficiently enforced on portions of an XML document while preserving the essential parts of the XML structure of the document.