Secure without secrets
by T. Colin Dodd
Architecture created by the National Security Agency and expanded with help from the open-source community will save the Defense Department and intelligence agencies millions in hardware costs.
Analysts used to need multiple computers because they worked on separate machines for each classification level of data they accessed. Soon, users will be able to access data from a single console that could cost $500 or less, thanks to the NSA security architecture dubbed Flask.
With Flask, “we can guarantee that high-integrity data can’t be corrupted by untrustworthy entities or that sensitive data doesn’t leak to untrustworthy entities,” said Stephen Smalley, one of the chief developers of Flask at NSA.
