Sypherlink, Spawar to confront data network challenges

Under a three-year cooperative research and development agreement, Sypherlink Inc. will work with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (Spawar) to find better ways of rapidly and securely sharing information among organizations via hastily formed secure data networks.

The agreement allows Sypherlink to investigate potential solutions to Navy and Defense Department requirements for quickly establishing data sharing between civil and military organizations, particularly in situations such as domestic disaster response or international humanitarian missions.

Even with the advent of wireless data communications protocols that make it possible to form ad hoc networks, organizations are often prevented from sharing information effectively because of the lack of common data formats and incompatible security protocols. Those problems have become apparent in recent years during events such as the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, the tsunami in Asia and Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. Gulf Coast region.

Nick Ramos Jr., an information assurance engineer at Spawar, said he got a close look at the problem during the recent San Diego wildfires.

"We could get every agency in the county into the same room, but when it came time to share data, it was all via sneakernet," he said, meaning that data had to be manually passed between agencies because their systems couldn't communicate. "Policy issues and security issues precluded people from connecting to one another."

In the future, it ought to be easier to share targeting information between the civilian 911 system and the military aircraft helping to fight a fire, he said.

Traditional systems and data integration projects can take months or years to develop, but in a crisis, unrelated organizations are often thrown together and expected to coordinate their activities immediately.

"For a typical Navy system, we're looking at at least six to 12 months from certification to accreditation," Ramos said. “Now imagine if we had to wait six to 12 months for a humanitarian response.”

Sypherlink proposes to address the problem with data integration technology based on the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), an architectural model based on Extensible Markup Language and developed by the federal government to improve interoperability between the systems used by different agencies, particularly for coordination between law enforcement and first responder agencies. Sypherlink has developed software products, such as its NIE Gateway, to aid with mapping the internal data model of a specific application to a NIEM-compliant format. However, just being able to exchange XML documents doesn't solve the whole problem.

As part of the agreement, Sypherlink will explore the practical challenges related to using technology in a crisis — for example, by ensuring that data security policies are respected by all the organizations that are sharing data. Another concern is providing mechanisms for sharing only the essential data for a common mission — for example, by letting participants in a humanitarian response share information about people who have been rescued or the logistics of the operation without giving them access to data that is sensitive or simply irrelevant, such as payroll records.

"In a lot of cases, people try to oversimplify the whole data integration effort," said James Paat, Sypherlink’s chief executive officer. “What we're going to be doing is breaking down into granular tasks all the steps that have to be completed to make this work. We're saying, ‘Let's not wait until the next disaster. Let's approach this proactively.’"

As part of the project, the company will identify data sources the Navy might need to tap in the future and link to them in advance, Paat said. "If in a time of crisis, a decision-maker says, ‘I need access to these 10 different data sources,’ we want to be able to tell you today how to get access to those 10 different sources."

NIEM was developed for domestic use, but as an XML-based technology, it is by nature extensible, Ramos said. That means international humanitarian organizations and foreign militaries could adopt it, particularly if the Navy can demonstrate the value and practicality of doing so, he added.

Ramos said scenarios such as disaster response are particularly relevant to the Navy, which often takes the lead in providing military assistance during a humanitarian crisis, whether on distant shores or in a port city such as New Orleans. Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, has identified humanitarian response operations as an area in which the Navy must excel.

Sypherlink’s project dovetails with that priority, although it is not the only way the technology could be applied.

"Humanitarian assistance and disaster response are definitely a primary area of concern, but you can also see how this would figure into coalition operations, where you need to share data at a tactical level," Ramos said.

The agreement with Sypherlink is not exclusive, but it is the first one Spawar has made on that specific issue, Ramos said.

The company will not receive direct funding under the agreement but will have the opportunity to create products it can later sell to the Navy and other agencies.