This White Paper brings the Information Exchange Gateway story up-to-date. It looks at the changing context in which they are being used; recent experiences in deploying them; and what the future holds.

Information exchange is required in the military context to provide seamless human-to-human communication across the force for mission planning and execution. To achieve this NATO has defined the concept of an Information Exchange Gateway (IEG) to securely manage the information exchange boundary between coalition systems.

An IEG is a solution for effecting information sharing between different security and information domains by providing a managed set of information exchange services. The purpose of the information exchange service is to connect domains that otherwise lack interoperability. Whilst information exchange is desired, the confidentiality and other information assurance aspects of connected information domains cannot be compromised and therefore suitable information protection services must be implemented.

In this paper, we explore the IEG concept, and look at the practical issues Nexor has encountered in deploying IEG solutions – largely based around flexibility to meet the business challenge and provide the required level of trust in the information exchange.

We propose that the solution to the challenges are based on a modular and accreditable architecture that enables flexibility in the deployment model (required by differing IEG scenarios).

For the longer term, this paper challenges the boundary models and reviews a number of research projects that are looking at alternatives to boundary security approaches.

The experiences highlighted show Nexor has been a driving force in the development and deployment of the IEG concept to enable trustworthy secure information exchange.