Guards and Gateways
The security threat landscape faced by governments is constantly changing, leading to increased demand for intelligence agencies and military forces to share information. This includes national and international infrastructures. In addition, the demand for public sector organisations to join up and share information to improve operational efficiency is rapidly increasing. However, this all comes at a time when the need to improve data handling to prevent further embarrassing data losses is a major focus.
The implication is that disparate systems from different agencies must be able to connect together and share information in a way that is simple and as transparent as possible for the users. As numerous examples have shown, if the security controls are too complex, users will either bypass them, inevitably leading to data loss, or not share data, leading to inefficient or critical situations.
Nexor provides guard and gateway solutions to facilitate easy, secure and policy compliant data exchange between disparate systems. Our guard solutions protect an organisation by ensuring that any outbound data is conformant to the data sharing policy, for example, is the recipient of the data entitled to receive it, and that any inbound data has been suitably checked to protect the organisation from inappropriate content that could lead to a downstream denial of service.
Our messaging guard products include Nexor Sentinel, which verifies X.400 and SMTP messages, ensuring that only email messages conformant to the defined security policy can be exchanged. The controls include dirty word filters, code word filtering (and aggregation), security label checks, links to third party filters and anti-virus capabilities. Sentinel is available on the EAL5+ accredited STOP 6 operating system (Sentinel 2) and the EAL4 accredited SE Linux (Sentinel 3).
In Sentinel, policy controls are enforced by Nexor Watchman, which provides content checking and verification technology. Watchman is the core of our data guard solutions and can be used to validate a wide variety of data content including instant messaging data exchanges (XMPP and SIMPLE), XML data transfers and web services.
Our gateway solutions enable data sent from one domain to be transformed so that a receiver can understand and correctly interpret it within their domain. Recent deployed examples include:
- A low-bandwidth gateway to transform data communications to ACP142
- A NATO information exchange gateway (IEG)
- A database gateway to transform emails onto labelled database records
- A security gateway to transform S/MIME security
- A MIXER gateway to transform SMTP messages to X.400
All Nexor software is written to conform to standards and is internationally renowned for its ability to enable secure information transfer within and between organisations.
