Enterprise High Assurance Scale-up

Many Organizations are moving to web-based approaches to computing. As the threat evolves to higher levels of sophistication, many governmental and commercial organizations are also moving toward high assurance. This paper describes an approach that uses strong bi-lateral end-to-end authentication with end-point encryption and with SAML-based authorization using OASIS Security Standards. This service-based approach offers many of the advantages of the cloud-based approaches. Cloud-based approaches allow for more agile scale-up, while maintain a low marginal cost of accommodating increased users. However, many of the applications require high assurance, attribution, formal access control processes, and a wide range of threat mitigation procedures for many of the industries (banking, credit, content distribution, etc.) that are considering conversion to cloud computing environments. Current implementations of cloud services do not meet these high assurance requirements. This high assurance requirement presents many challenges to normal computing and some rather precise requirements that have developed from high assurance issues for web service applications. The most difficult part of scaling up to higher user levels is the maintenance of the security paradigms that provide mitigation of these generic and specific threats.