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"To enhance national security through
the military application of nuclear energy"
and "to reduce global danger from
weapons of mass destruction
(WMD)." Those are just two of the national
missions specified by Congress when it
established the National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA) in 2000. Today,
NNSA has eight major facilities nationwide,
with countless buildings and structures
housing some of our country’s most intricate
and important national security work
and information assets. These critical assets
range from the world’s fastest supercomputers
processing sensitive nuclear data that
ensure the safety of the nation’s nuclear
stockpile, to advanced technologies for detecting
WMD proliferation. NNSA’s information
systems must be secured against
cyberattack and compromise — protection
of these information assets is paramount to
our nation’s security.
To meet the demands of a dynamic
cyberthreat environment, NNSA needed to
move from its disparate, site-specific, classified
network infrastructure to a secure enterprise
solution. As prime contractor and
systems integrator, Raytheon worked with
NNSA to research, plan, implement, test
and accredit the Enterprise Secure Network
(ESN). This highly secure network enables
NNSA sites and laboratories across the
country to better share classified data in a
secured enterprise environment.
For more than nine years, Raytheon has delivered
secured, integrated intrusion analysis
and computer forensics systems to keep
NNSA on the leading edge of cybersecurity.
During ESN development and implementation,
we provided program and project
management, network engineering, system
administration and help-desk support —
as well as network and security operations
facilities management — to prevent and
detect threats. Located at the U.S.
Department of Energy's Cyber Incident
Response Capability, or DOE-CIRC, in Las
Vegas, the operations facilities are a
Raytheon-developed and managed center
for enterprisewide intrusion analysis and
cyberforensics services.
Built with commercial off-the-shelf hardware
and software and by implementing security
best practices, Raytheon’s ESN system
solution provides enterprise-level access
management in a highly complex, classified
environment. After extensive integration,
testing and certification, the ESN is now
deployed to NNSA laboratories and plants,
encompassing all communications and computing
systems and services, software applications,
system data and security services.
Using ESN’s two-factor, federated authentication
based on Security Assurance Markup
Language (SAML), general users can access
Web-based applications at other NNSA sites. The ESN is among the first uses
of SAML for federated, cross-site authentication
of users and authorization to resources
on one major government network.
Enhanced security features include need-to-know
restrictions and network monitoring.
The ESN is both critical to the security of the
nuclear weapons program and essential to
transforming the Cold War nuclear weapons
complex into a 21st-century national security
enterprise. The network is a crucial
component to the NNSA’s Complex
Transformation — the agency’s vision for a
smaller, safer, more secure and more cost-effective
national security enterprise.
As NNSA continues to evolve, the foundation
of Raytheon’s ESN solution supports
the long-term vision of secure information
sharing across a wider set of agencies and
boundaries. The next phase of ESN enhancements
includes a cross-domain Secret
Internet Protocol Router Network, or
SIPRNet, Gateway to transmit classified
information to the U.S. Department of
Defense and other government agencies.
The future also holds a similar installation
of security mechanisms and infrastructure
in the yellow or sensitive but unclassified
environment.
For information contact Debra J Tighe
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