Data Mediation with Enterprise Level Security

Enterprise Level Security (ELS) is an architecture for enabling information sharing with strong security guarantees. It is built upon basic tenets and concepts that shape its component technologies and implementation. One challenge in sharing information is that the source and recipient of the information may use different units, protocols, data formats, or tools to process information. As a result, a transformation of the data is needed before the recipient can use the information. These conversions introduce potential security weaknesses into an ELS system, so an approach for enterprise-wide mediation is required. Methods in common use today, such as a man-in-the-middle (MITM) translation or and an online mediation service, do not preserve the basic ELS tenets and concepts. This paper examines these existing approaches and compares them with two new approaches designed to preserve ELS security. It looks at the complete picture of security, performance, and ease of implementation, offering a framework for choosing the best mediation approach based on the data sharing context.