SINS Features Overview

SINS middleware supports the implementation of secure, distributed applications. It has some unique features that differentiate it from other middleware:

Guaranteed Delivery vs. Best Effort: For high system reliability, SINS guarantees that all messages get delivered to all relevant applications in the same order (called total ordering), and that messages only get delivered to all relevant applications or none at all.

Guaranteed Preservation of Global Properties: For high system reliability, SINS also guarantees that certain system properties, such as ranges of system variables, meet specified constraints (global shared state). Static analysis is done using NRL’s SALSA tool. Dynamic analysis, reporting, and response at run-time are done using monitoring agents (e.g. security agents).   

Application Survivability: To make sure SINS applications still function in hostile environments, SINS supports a replication and state propagation mechanism which tolerates the loss of individual nodes without losing information or functionality.

Strong Information Security: To ensure good information security, SINS includes a number of features, such as group confidentiality by encrypting all data using the Blowfish algorithm with a contributory key agreement protocol, security monitoring/reporting agents.

Model Based Application Development: To simplify application development, NRL’s SAGE and SOLJ technologies allow SINS applications to be easily developed using graphical UML tools. SAGE also enables the easy reconfiguration of application functionality and deployment.

Support for Central Administration: To monitor and manage system activity and incidents effectively, SINS supports the use of a central console application. In addition, monitoring consoles can also be deployed on several (or all) nodes.

Certifiable Code Base: Thanks to its very small code base, SINS is ideally suited for accreditation under Common Criteria, even to higher EALs.

Scalability: SINS can scale to tens of thousand of hosts and hundreds of thousands of agents.

Commercial Technical Support and Services: SINS is vendor-supported by ObjectSecurity on behalf of NRL. Support contracts, consulting, and development services help you evaluate, deploy, and maintain SINS applications.

SINS consists of an infrastructure, a language, and a methodology. Software agents, defined in the Secure Operations Language (SOL), execute and communicate with one another and with services via the SINS infrastructure. The methodology guides the development of software agents and helps developers reuse existing patterns for their design. The SINS methodology, language, and infrastructure are multi-faceted. It has been our experience that a simple description of our framework is inadequate to expose all these facets.

SINS ATM prototype Project (July 2006)

ObjectSecurity and the U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL) have signed an R&D subcontract to work on a project for NRL's SINS middleware. The goal of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's secure middleware (SINS) and ObjectSecurity's OpenPMF policy management framework is to develop infrastructure for the deployment and protection of time- and mission-critical applications on a distributed computing platform, in a challenged computing environment such as the Internet, while using unreliable or untrusted COTS components. Government and Industry are increasingly dependent on the use of applications in a collaborative environment spanning multiple sites, by multiple agencies, and across multiple enterprises. In the SINS project, we are rethinking basic ways in which distributed applications are developed, deployed, configured, and maintained.