New Technology Fosters Coalition Collaboration

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

McLean, Virginia, February 20, 2002 — The MITRE Corporation has designed a prototype security guard for enabling cross-domain collaboration and improving communication in the coalition environments that will be used in this spring's NATO operation, Strong Resolve 2002.

The prototype, called Collaboration Techniques for Coalition Teams (CT2), was designed to provide multilingual Instant Messaging (IM) between users in independent network or security domains. The CT2 security guard enforces security policy and formatting restrictions to include access control checking, protocol verification, use of digital signatures, and dirty word searching to determine whether messages and presence information should be permitted to traverse a network/security boundary. This type of tool could be used to clarify anomalies in intelligence data, resolve operations and issues pertaining to requirements management, and to set priorities for resource tasking.

CT2 will be tested this spring within the NATO environment as part of Strong Resolve 2002. Exercise planners have expressed high interest in the ability to conduct secure "chat" sessions with support for foreign language translation. According to Mark Lawrence, General Manager of NATO's Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation (BICES) Agency, "We have 17 nations in the BICES community who will be watching CT2 testing closely to see how successfully it performs. Based on the results, we hope to be able to push ahead with providing this capability to the allied nations conducting ongoing counter-terrorism operations and planning."

The CT2 prototype utilizes the Simple Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (SIMP) and the Translingual Instant Messenger (TrIM) technology designed at MITRE. The SIMP protocol implements IM and presence services, and enables users to transmit and verify digitally-signed messages. SIMP provides the ability to interconnect distributed communities of interest using real-time collaboration technology. TrIM client software provides machine language translation for IM—a useful capability in multi-national environments. TrIM enables collaborators to overcome language barriers that can impede coalition operations.

MITRE (www.mitre.org) is a not-for-profit national technology resource that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia. MITRE frequently makes new technologies, such as TrIM, available for licensing. Anyone interested in pursuing a license for TrIM, or other available technologies should contact Gerard Eldering, MITRE's Technology Transfer Office Director at (703) 983-7132.

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