Mitigating cyber-security risks using MILS

The problem of securely storing and processing a hierarchy of sensitive data is of paramount importance in many sectors, like Defense or Critical Infrastructures, just to name a few. Since years Industry and Academia have been involved in researches focused on multilevel security, formal languages, and new platform modeling frameworks. The Multiple Independent Levels of Security/Safety is a new paradigm able to effectively address the problem of protecting highly sensitive information. Until now, the main application of such a paradigm was in Cross-Domain solutions in the military and aerospace sectors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows how MILS technology can work in a distributed environment. Our goal is to present a proof-of-concept that shows how MILS can enhance the communications security in distributed systems and its application can be effective also in ordinary networks.