NEXOR ANNOUNCES SUPPORT FOR INTERNATIONAL LABELLING

April 2010

In response to market demand, Nexor has implemented various enhancements to its Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) software portfolio to support international labelling. 

The new functionality enables mapping of any national label to any other national label, independent of the syntax or the language of the label presented. This means that nations can use their own national labelling policies and formats and use Nexor border security devices to transparently interpret each label and map between national formats as required. This facility is a major enabler of interoperability, which is essential in today’s world of collaboration and cooperation against increasing enemy threat.

It is a long-standing problem that no common definition exists for a text-based label, so nations and organisations have defined their own over the years. Interoperability has then been facilitated through bilateral agreements and the use of common agreed subsets, such as the NATO label set. These multiple parameters have represented challenges for supporting technology, including:

• The need to find and interpret labels written in multiple languages and different character sets
• The ability to recognise and interpret a label in a variety of different formats and syntaxes, for example, one nation may separate releasability markings with a “/” whereas another may use “and”.

This multiplicity results in having to implement guard and gateway technology to connect domains together and for these border devices to be able to handle the different formats with the relevant transformation and protection.

To assist with the management of these variances, Nexor has implemented the following fundamental software changes:

• Added support for non US-ASCII characters in text based labels
• Added a flexible mechanism to handle different formats of text based labels.

The revised software parses labels using pre-defined rules that can be plugged in. A specific rule set has been defined for NATO nations and a basic generic rule set has been defined to use with “simpler” labels.

In relation to Nexor’s COTS products, Nexor Sentinel, the high assurance mailguard, can check labels in the text of messages that contain any language characters and any format and make accurate decisions based on the content of the label.

The Centurion component of Nexor Border Gateway, Nexor’s transformation gateway, can now map labels between different formats in multiple languages.

Colin Robbins, Chief Technical Officer commented “Yet again, Nexor has accepted a difficult technical challenge and deployed an innovative and extensible technical solution which will extend secure interoperability in one of the world’s most demanding network environments.”