Interoperability is where security is really tested, says Luke Terry, CTO of the platform Mindlink.
The most secure collaboration platform is useless the moment a coalition partner cannot reach it. A platform that can only talk to itself is a digital island. It may be well defended, but every mission that involves a partner nation on an XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) network, a different command or a system running on last decade’s infrastructure turns the island into the problem. Information that cannot reach the people who need it has failed.
The instinct in secure environments is to consolidate around one platform and one accreditation boundary. But coalitions are not one platform. They are a federation of national systems, each with its own policies and accreditation. Making everyone adopt the same software will never work. What works is software that can federate with what partners actually run, and in a coalition today that is very often XMPP.
XMPP is an open messaging standard that has carried military chat for more than twenty years. It is mandated in US Department of Defense Unified Capabilities frameworks and sits at the core of NATO’s Federated Mission Networking, to which the UK contributes. XMPP is the common language of coalition chat, and any platform that wants to operate in a coalition must speak it properly.
For the UK the point is far from academic. British forces rarely deploy alone, and the Ministry of Defence’s digital backbone is meant to connect UK forces with allies as readily as with each other. A headquarters that cannot reach a partner on XMPP falls short of that ambition, whatever the accreditation certificate on the wall says.
XMPP is not the end state. It was built for an earlier generation of messaging rather than for data centric security, and the coalitions of the future will need modern federation protocols designed to carry those controls natively. For now, though, it is how many partners connect, and there is a wide gap between a basic bridge that passes text between rooms and interoperability that can carry an operation.
Coalition operations depend on presence, private and group conversations, file exchange, and the XMPP extensions defence deployments have standardised over years. The test of any XMPP integration is whether it covers the protocol as defence actually uses it, has been proven in service rather than in a demonstration, and rests on a published federation approach that accreditors can inspect.
A path forwardย
Most defence organisations are moving towards data centric security and Zero Trust, but none of them start from a blank sheet. Many classified estates still run their day to day chat on Skype for Business for example, accredited years ago and woven into how people actually work, while their coalition partners sit on XMPP. Neither was designed for data centric security, so classification and access decisions rest with the network and the server rather than travelling with the information itself. Any move to a modern platform has to have the principle of data centric security installed and enabled.
Users cannot be moved onto a new system in a single day, and partner nations cannot be told to change how they connect. What is needed is a platform built for data centric security and Zero Trust from the ground up that also looks backwards, federating with the existing Skype for Business estate so that users, conversations and workflows continue while migration happens at the pace accreditation allows.
At the same time it has to look outwards, speaking XMPP to partner nations as a native capability rather than an afterthought, so that coalition connections never drop during the transition. Done properly, the same platform becomes the bridge between the legacy estate and the coalition, carrying policy and classification with every message in both directions. That is the real meaning of a path forward. Modernising the security model without breaking either the connections inside the organisation or the ones to allies outside it.
Security that survives the crossing
Data centric security means every piece of information carries its own labels expressing attributes such as classification, and those labels are leveraged to enable consistent security controls to be applied wherever the data is stored, processed, or shared.ย This means that data centric security is not only about labels, but what a collaboration platform can do with them. Attribute based access control means decisions about who can see what are made on a combination of the data itself and the people requesting it, along with the device they are using, not on which server the information sits on. Zero Trust ties the two together. Nothing is trusted simply for being inside the network, so every request is verified, every time, against policy.
Federation is where all three are properly tested, because a coalition partner is by definition outside your network and outside your control. In Zero Trust terms, every message arriving from a partner’s XMPP server is a stranger at the door. It has to be authenticated, its sender’s attributes checked and its classification enforced before it goes anywhere. Any bridge that simply relays traffic from one side to the other has not extended Zero Trust across the boundary effectively.
So when a message leaves for a partner’s XMPP server, does its classification travel with it, or is the label stripped at the border? Can an accreditor audit the whole chain, across both organisations and both protocols?
If the answer is yes, it requires a platform designed around need to know classification from the outset, with a federation protocol built to carry those controls across organisational boundaries, and the same discipline extended to the XMPP connection. This ensures a partner using XMPP is governed by the same policy as a user inside the platform.
In a NATO federation that discipline has a defined standard. ADatP-4774 sets out how confidentiality labels are expressed and ADatP-4778 how they are bound to the information they describe, so that a label applied in one nation can be read and enforced in another. Compliance with both is increasingly expected of any platform joining a NATO mission network. But NATO is only one coalition.
The same data centric principles have to hold with equal rigour across any allied grouping, from long standing partnerships to coalitions formed for a single operation, and a platform that can only apply them inside NATO has solved only part of the problem.
The importance of inter-operabilityย
Secure, sovereign and inter-operable are one requirement, not three. A coalition needs to share information with the people who need it, withhold it from the people who do not, and do both across systems it does not control. A platform that can only manage the first two inside its own walls has built an island.
