Capabilities

The Cougaar security services include the following policy-based services:

¨ Agent-based certificates authorities (CA). A CA can issue keys for agents, nodes, hosts and users, and CAs periodically issue certificate revocation lists (CRL). CAs can be configured as a flat or hierarchical PKI, with one or more root CAs and multiple subordinate CAs. Agents can get their keys from multiple CAs.

¨ Public/private keys: each agent may be assigned a key from a CA and use it for authentication and confidentiality purposes. Agents automatically request new keys before their key expire. Agents continuously monitor CAs for new CRLs and reject connections when certificates are invalid.

¨ Message encryption and signature: agents can use stream and/or message oriented cryptography. Individual Cougaar messages may be signed and encrypted. Also, agent to agent connections can be encrypted using SSL connections.

¨ Data encryption and signature: blackboard persistence snapshots can be encrypted and signed.

¨ Key escrow: As dictated by policy, agents may use key escrow management agents when encrypting blackboard persistence data. This may be used to recover blackboard snapshots if the agent key is destroyed.

¨ HTTPS support: agents use the Cougaar PKI to protect HTTP connections.

¨ User authentication: The security services provide an agent-based user management agent. The user manager maintains a database of users. It supports user domains.

¨ User access control: All user interactions with agents can be controlled by policy. The policy dictates the authentication requirements (e.g. basic user name/password, digest password, client and server certificate authentication) and the confidentiality requirements (whether HTTPS must be used or not).

¨ Monitoring and response subsystem: a set of sensors has been developed to monitor and report security events.

¨ JAAS authentication: each agent and each component may run in its own JAAS security context, which allows to enforce different security policies for different agents and/or components.

¨ Blackboard access control: A set of binders can control what component can query, add, modify or remove blackboard objects.

¨ Service access control: A set of binders perform access control on Cougaar services. For example, white pages and community service requests can be controlled by the security services.

¨ Message access control: a set of binders control what messages can flow between agents.

All of these services are policy-based, which means it is easy to enforce a system-wide and community-wide policy. The policy can be changed dynamically while the society is running.

Cougaar Security Services

Adaptive security services for the Cougaar platform