NEW YORK, NY -
July 19,2005
- Objective Interface Systems, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance, real-time and embedded communications middleware, today presented MILS (Multiple Independent Levels of Security), an emerging high-assurance security architecture for mission-critical systems, during The Open Group's Information Assurance for High-risk Environments seminar held here today. During the seminar, Joe Jacob, senior vice president of Objective Interface, explained why government and commercial organizations have joined forces to develop a software architecture that will bring high-assurance security and safety to vulnerable infrastructure information networks. The MILS architecture was developed to protect the most highly sensitive military and intelligence communications networks. The networks that comprise the international financial and commercial communications infrastructure deserve no less protection. Breaching the confidentiality of information transmitted on these networks can result in great damage. In the recent case at MasterCard, for example, hackers accessed up to 40 million consumers' credit card numbers. This story spanned the globe, with articles appearing throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Japan. These incidents shake the confidence in our financial infrastructure. As neither corporations nor defense agencies can afford these security breaches, five years ago Objective Interface joined with development partners that included government entities such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), military and aerospace contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and The MITRE Corporation, and other software development tools companies to architect this highly robust architecture.

“Our specific contribution to MILS is the middleware portion of the new standard. This MILS communications architecture has the potential to address foundational security problems in a wide variety of distributed systems: from infrastructure systems, such as utility grids and global information networks, to high-speed 10Gb Ethernet and RDMA networks, and even to the smallest embedded applications, such as vehicle area networks in automobiles,” said Mr. Jacob. “With our development partners, we are at the forefront of launching a new software architecture that will protect data that is vital to national security and to personal privacy.”

How MILS Works
MILS is a separation architecture that works by partitioning programs, their data and their communications in distributed systems. MILS provides high-assurance separation so that multiple security concerns can be combined onto a single set of computers, thereby allowing institutions to replace several computers with one that is MILS-compliant. This has the potential to save corporations significant hardware and administrative costs.

All of the vendors of MILS operating systems provide compatibility with existing operating systems. For example, Windows and Linux can run simultaneously in a partition on some MILS-compliant operating systems. This compatibility with existing operating systems makes for a relatively painless transition for those enterprises migrating to a MILS-protected environment.

The Open Group's Seminar: Information Assurance for High-risk Environments
On July 19, 2005, The Open Group is hosting a one-day seminar at the Westin Times Square in New York to explore the synergy for information assurance among the U.S. Department of Defense, government and commercial enterprises. Speakers from The Open Group join information assurance experts from Objective Interface, Lockheed Martin, The MITRE Corporation and The Advanced Systems Management Group to discuss an affordable infrastructure for interoperable applications running on public and private information grids. For more detail on Information Assurance for High-risk Environments, please visit: http://www.opengroup.org/events/q305/ia.htm.

As an open standards body deeply committed to the certification of software products compliant with the DOD's most stringent multi-level security requirements, we have nurtured a collaborative effort that counts the Financial Services Technology Consortium, Object Management Group and Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium among its contributors. These organizations, which include Objective Interface, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, the U.S. AFRL, U.S. Army and NSA, have teamed to make the MILS architecture real, said David Lounsbury, Vice President of Government Programs, The Open Group. Our goal is to publicize the fact that a new open communications protocol that was originally designed for the DoD is now available to corporate America.

About MILS
MILS is an architecture for high-assurance security. MILS protects against unauthorized access and disclosure in distributed systems even in the presence of system failure. It is based on the foundational theories of Dr. John Rushby of the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1980's. MILS evolved through a collaboration among industry, government and education institutions. The architectural foundation for MILS was developed jointly by the U.S. AFRL, NSA, University of Idaho, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Rockwell Collins, the MITRE Corporation, The Open Group, Objective Interface Systems, Green Hills Software, Lynux Works and Wind River Systems. For more information on MILS, please visit: www.ois.com/mils.

About Objective Interface Systems
Objective Interface Systems is a worldwide leader of high-performance, real-time and embedded middleware communications. The company provides extremely low-overhead communications technologies in various forms: distributed objects (CORBA), publish-subscribe (DDS) and secure communications middleware development tools to meet the high-performance requirements of transportation, telecommunications, data communications, industrial automation, consumer electronics, robotics, military and aerospace markets. Objective Interface products, sold worldwide, are used in a variety of mission-critical applications, including communication systems, mission-critical avionics systems, network management, vehicle control and management systems, software defined radio, fiber-optic switching systems, process control and nuclear fusion ignition facilities. For more information, visit www.ois.com, call 1-800-800-OIS7, or e-mail inquiries to: mils2005@ois.com.

Objective Interface Systems and the Objective Interface logo are trademarks of Objective Interface Systems, Inc. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

PRESS CONTACTS (not for publication):

OBJECTIVE INTERFACE
Alison Alberich
Phone: 703/295-6513
Email: alison.alberich@ois.com

VETRANO COMMUNICATIONS
Maria Vetrano
617/876-2770