Press Room

Ensuring a high level of assurance of security and safety for key industries

BOSTON, MA – MARCH 10, 2021 – The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) today announced the MILS Architectural Approach Supporting Trustworthiness of IIoT Solutionswhite paper. The new paper describes the MILS architectural approach, which is a strategy for cost-effective construction of systems that require dependability and high assurance. The paper explains how the architectural approach helps in building trustworthy IIoT systems and includes MILS case studies.

“MILS builds on and extends a long tradition of work on architectural approaches to security and provides methods and tools to create high-assurance architectures for secure information sharing and dependable systems,” said Rance J. DeLong, security and assurance consultant, Staff Scientist, The Open Group, and one of the authors of the white paper. “These approaches leverage system architecture to prohibit unauthorized subjects from accessing or modifying sensitive information. A thoughtful architecture also limits damage from a compromised or failed subject.”

Initially, the acronym “MILS” stood for Multiple Independent Levels of Security/Safety. Today, it is used as a proper name for an approach that starts with partitioning a system into isolated compartments, or security domains. While it comprises much more, the MILS architecture is often characterized as the use of a separation kernel on a system to run applications belonging to diverse security domains or that have different levels of safety requirements. MILS supports scalable, distributed, and heterogeneous environments and dynamically changing configurations. It enhances the trustworthiness of IIoT systems, including the five critical characteristics featured in the IIC Industrial Internet Security Framework (IISF) – safety, reliability, resilience, security, and privacy.

“A key MILS objective is to encourage a competitive commercial marketplace of off-the-shelf high-assurance components,” said Ekaterina Rudina, Security Analysis Group Manager, Kaspersky, and one of the authors of the white paper. “The technologies underlying MILS and the tool chain supporting MILS system development enable reasoning about the interaction of the components, criticalities and resulting functionality, and trustworthiness characteristics. MILS is ideal for systems requiring a high level of assurance for security, safety, or other key characteristics in sectors such as automotive, avionics, industrial automation, defense, and critical infrastructures.”

The MILS Architectural Approach Supporting Trustworthiness of the IIoT Solutions white paper white paper can be found here on the IIC website.

About Industrial Internet Consortium
The Industrial Internet Consortium is the world’s leading organization transforming business and society by accelerating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Our mission is to deliver transformative business value to organizations, industry, and society by accelerating adoption of a trustworthy internet of things. The Industrial Internet Consortium is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG). For more information visit www.iiconsortium.org.

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