The goal of the Military Message Systems (MMS) project is to specify the requirements and design of a family of secure military message systems and to build full-scale prototypes of two family members. This paper describes several techniques that are being used in the MMS project: the application of Parnas’ program family principle to both the requirements document and the design specification, the definition of an Intermediate Command Language to describe the user services provided by family members, the formulation of an application-based security model to define the security rules that each message system must enforce, and the construction of quick prototypes to validate requirements and to evaluate different user interface designs. The paper concludes by describing the project’s current status.

--From the Authors’ Abstract

This paper provides an interim report on a current Naval Research Laboratory effort to improve the application of automation to the handling of military messages. One distinction of this approach is that while it is principally oriented towards the processing of formal messages (i.e., official message traffic between military organizations), it will also support informal message exchange (i.e., unofficial traffic between individuals). While the integrity of message security protection is a paramount requirement in the military data communication environment, and thus of the MMS approach, it is also relevant to other message handling environments where security must be maintained. As such, this paper could be of value to many other non-military data communication system designers.