Examination of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) to FacilitateUser-Friendly Multilevel Email Management

Information systems within the Department of Defense (DoD) need trustworthy enforcement of critical security policies against sophisticated attackers. Data, such as email, is processed on these systems on a daily basis. Since this data may contain sensitive information, special handling is required to prevent unauthorized disclosure. For these reasons, a high assurance Multilevel secure (MLS) Local Area Network (LAN) was developed to control the sharing of information at different security levels. A challenge in multilevel environments is to provide a usable and meaningful interface to users via the email clients. These email clients interact with the high assurance server running on the MLS LAN. The high assurance server returns information at security levels at or below those of the client. An email client is only able to write and manipulate mail at its level. Therefore, client systems should provide users with feedback regarding operations they are able to perform. In this research, six criteria were established to examine email clients. These criteria evaluated messages displayed to users via the email clients. All of the email clients was able to satisfy at least one of the established criteria.Naval Postgraduate School Monterey CA is the author of 'Examination of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) to FacilitateUser-Friendly Multilevel Email Management', published 2000 under ISBN 9781423533672 and ISBN 1423533674.