Enterprise Level Security – Basic Security Model
Kevin E. Foltz, William R. Simpson
Maintaining, updating, and modifying such a system based on
changing enterprise needs and advancing technology is even
more challenging. Decisions and informal rules that were made
and enacted in the initial build are often lost, forgotten, or
ignored when changes are needed. When the original system
designers have moved on, the system is entrusted to an
administrator who understands how the system works but not
why it was designed to work that way. Without this higher-level
understanding, the secure system devolves into a collection of
loosely integrated partial solutions with security vulnerabilities
at the seams and edges. This work presents a method of
documenting the design logic of a secure enterprise information
system, from basic principles to implementable requirements.
Important design decisions are captured, along with the logic
supporting them. Before changes to the system are made, an
assessment is made against the core design decisions to ensure
the original security goals are maintained. This provides clarity
to the system owner and administrators to help guide future
changes, and it provides a way to convey security goals to
product vendors in a structured and logical way, which can help
to reduce the back-and-forth arguing over whether a product
meets security requirements. The Enterprise Level Security
(ELS) architecture is used as an example of the application of
this method to a real-world security system Full Text
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