Qinetiq, one of the two organisations created from the former Defence Evaluation and Research Agency in 2001,has announced that is has completed that acquisition of Boldon James. It has paid some £20million, with just over £4million of that being conditional on future performance.

It appears they are changing the high assurance messaging guard at NATO. Since 1997 NATO have used Thales XOMail/Guard to provide separation between NATO and MISSION environments.
Now it appears that NAMSA is procuring the NEXOR Sentinel as "the high assurance mailguard of choice for operational use".

The French DGA has initiated a project to develop an open-source military messaging solution based upon the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. The project is supported by the French Ministry of Defence and BT Global Services, and aims to provide a set of services to support formal messaging including:

• security - signature and encryption
• security labelling - using ESS
• status notifications - including signed receipts
• directory integration - for addressing information and certificate validation
• STANAG 4406 elements of service.

A new web site, http://www.x500standard.com/ provides a new, centralized resource for information about the X.500 standards.
It provides:

• a high-level overview of the X.500 Directory model and technology
• free PDF versions of all the latest X.500 standards
• the lastest corrigenda
• lists of X.500 products and consultants
• and a discussion list for discussing things X.500, including defect reports.

All-in-all a good first stop if you are just looking to get up to speed with X.500, or are interested in the more detailed elements of specifications.

The CWID '07 trials start in the second week of June, and messaging and directory vendors are participating in a number of those trials.

• Clearswift demonstrate their messaging (SMTP and X.400), directory (DISP) and management (SNMP) high assurance guards in the NATO trials "NMS Interoperability". In addition, they are participating in a UK trial, "Security Labelling From Text Labels to X.841 labels" (UKIT17), to show how security labels can be securely mapped between the different formats that are supported by different domains.

As well as opening a wide range of packet capture files, Wireshark can now open ASN.1 encoded files, such as certificates or X.400 content. So now you can view your own ASN.1 dumps in exactly the same way as if you had captured them from the network.

This gives Wireshark a similar capability to Microsoft's ASpiriN, Gemini Security Solutions GUIDumpASN (based on Peter Guttman's dumpasn1.c) and a range of other ASN.1 analysis tools.

If you are looking for a formally evaluated Mail Guard to protect messages from two different security domains, there are currently a number of productson the market:

• Clearswift Deepsecure R2.1 (EAL4)
• Nexor Sentinel (EAL4)
• Thales XOmail/Guard (TCSEC B1+ - equivalent to EAL4)

Wireshark now supports the dissection of the Direct Messaging Protocol (DMP).

DMP is a STANAG 4406 interoperable, MTA to MTA protocol that allows the exchange of messages within the strategic domain. It is significantly more bandwith efficient than Tactical Messaging Interfaces (TMI) defined Annex E of STANAG 4406, but at the expense of functionality. Further details of the protocol can be obtained from the MMHWG Archive (login required).

Support for DMP is now available in the Wires

CA have produced a case study on the Fujitsu-led NZDF secure military messaging solution.

Designed by Mark Bodley from Fujitsu(UK) and including a range of products from Nexor, Boldon James, Microsoft as well as CA, the system is now being extended to provide gateways to other domains.

CA's eTust Directory r8.1 provides the ACP133 compliant backbone directory service within the system, using DISP for replication between the node

The latest version of Clearswift's DeepSecure messaging boundary protection device has just achieved a Common Criteria EAL 4 evaluation.

The new version includes a number of new features, including support for X.841 based security labels, as well as a comprehensively revised management interface.

The evaluation of DeepSecure Release 2.1 includes the following security functions:

• The ClearPoint management functions for the definition, modification, selection and activation of message policy, and for managing policy and monitoring policy application;