In the closing session of the Boston Conference plenary, Eliot Solomon presented his
document "Boundaryless Information Flow Reference Architecture: Boundaryless Business
Models". This is an additional document to the previous Reference Architecture and
Family of Architectures documents that were presented in the February 2003 Conference.
Eliot advised that all The Open Group work he has done on architectures for
Boundaryless Information Flow is available from his personal web site. He pointed to the
Security Architectures web page at www.opengroup.org/projects/sec-arch/,
which offers logged-in users access to his personal web site at www.eliotsolomon.com/togsec/. A link from
this page gives access to the Boundaryless Business Models document RA-Models-v0.3.doc.
Nick Mansfield introduced work that has been done in previous years by the ICX
consortium in this area, as part of the European Union SECCOM project, which he felt is
relevant to this work. He offered the questions that were formed as part of this project
as a basis to arrive at a set of architectural requirements in the security view of any
architectural model. These requirements can then be extrapolated to become elements in the
security architecture for that model.
Referring to this SECCOM model work, Nick proposed that for each of the six business
models described in Eliot's Boundaryless Business Models document, we should provide
answers to the following questions:
- What is the CIAAA requirement?(confidentiality, integrity, accountability, audit,
availability)
- Which of the security requirements dominate?
- Are there conflicting viewpoints on this within the model?
- What is the "anchor" of trust in the scope?
- Are there natural interests that set in opposition to strengthen the security model?
- What are the threats (technical)?
- Who is likely to "cheat" in the business?
- Who is likely to lose value (money) and how much is their risk? Who will be liable for
the loss?
- What are the trade-offs that might be made; e.g., access control versus audit?
- Who would be responsible for any "security administration" that would be
required? Where is their vested interest? What is their incentive to do it well?
This questionnaire was uploaded to the www.opengroup.org/projects/sec-arch/
web page and used in the meeting as a learning and proving exercise to look at several
aspects of some of the six business models in Eliot's latest document, to draw out what it
would mean and what you need to know to generate a security architecture view of a
business model. At the end of the discussion the revised document was uploaded to the
conference web page at www.opengroup.org/conference-live/.
It was agreed that this exercise was useful, so we will continue to use the
questionnaire in a SecF topic telecon call in the interval between now and the next
meeting, and will schedule a working session in the Washington DC meeting where we will
aim to collate in an orderly manner the security architecture view answers on all these
business models. From this we should be able to derive a family of security architectures
comprising common components and special components.
Adopt the Boundaryless Information Flow Reference Architecture - Security Architecture
View Questionnaire, with the intent to use it to collate in an orderly manner the security
architecture view information on all the six business models presented in the Boundaryless
Business Models document.
ACTION: All
Schedule a SecF topic telecon call in the interval between now and the next meeting to
progress this activity to progress the Security Architecture View Questionnaire exercise
on the six Boundaryless Business Models.
ACTION: Ian
Plan a half-day working session in the next (Oct 20-24) Washington DC meeting where we
will aim to complete the Security Architecture View Questionnaire exercise on the six
Boundaryless Business Models.
ACTION: Ian
