Acp145 Gateway - Enabling Military Communications Interoperability across forces and between Allies and Operational Partners

The face of the modern defence force is changing rapidly. No longer does a civilised nation go to war on its own. All operations, whether they are exercises or the real thing are alliance or coalition tasks. The challenge now facing military commanders is effective, reliable, secure electronic communications across international boundaries with allies and operational partners.

In an international coalition exercise, how does one military high security domain, interface to another from a different country? The issue is not just one of connectivity or even language (communications and translation services are constantly improving). Apart from network connectivity and security, the issue is one of semantics and trust. How do we translate a US DMS Security Label into a British Label? How can we be sure that the message really came from the Australian Task Force commander and has not been amended in transit?

The interoperability solution

Originally developed by CCEB 5-Nations (AUS, CAN, NZ, UK, US) ACP145 is now in the process of adoption by NATO. ACP145 is designed to not only support physical interoperability but also to manage the issues of trust and semantics discussed above. The Boldon James ACP 145 solution is now deployed by the UK MoD as the world’s first deployment of this technology. The Boldon James product is the ONLY deployed solution that supports ACP145 on the outbound segment and Stanag 4406 on the In-bound segment.

Military message handling gateway

Interoperability Between ACP120 and SMIME/ESS Messaging

Modular Design

High Grade military messaging solutions need to be reliable, secure, and deliver consistent performance and the Microsoft Exchange server, on which the ACP145 Gateway is engineered, is already proven to deliver these requirements. As a modular design, the ACP145 Gateway comprises:

An ‘inside engine’ that interfaces with the local military message handling system (MMHS) managing signature, encryption and security label mapping
An ‘outside engine’ that translates to and from ACP145 and handles communication to remote systems.

This architecture allows for common outside engines and deployment in different countries through the delivery of local variants of the inside engine. Most nations have more than one MMHS to cater for their Army, Navy and Air Force. The modular design of our ACP145 Gateway enables these MMHS’ to link together as a single unified system or link different email messaging systems together i.e. linking a military intelligence system to a Homeland Security system.

Key Benefits

Achieves the secure exchange of information between MMHS from different nations or different military organisations within the same nation
A multi-vendor gateway capable of interoperating with other third party ACP145 gateways and legacy messaging systems
Built using COTS Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 for reliability, improved performance and a low total cost of ownership.

Key Features

Converts various national military protocols and standards to the common ACP145 standard including the US ACP120 and NATO STANAG4406
Out of the box Compliance with NATO STANAG 4406 and PCT standards
Extendable to support US DMS MSP4 and other message handling standards
Supports S/MIME Signatures (encryption option available) between gateways enabling compliance with security policies / boundary controls
Supports the exchange of multiple attachments
Supports bi-lateral agreement mapping to correctly interpret between national and international domains including security classification labels, precedence levels and operation type
Supports the conversion of a multiple recipient message where individual recipients may be on different ACP145 gateways
Provides for protective message label mapping and creates non-delivery reports for invalid messages
Modular design for ease of operation and support with ability to run on multi-processor fault tolerant configurations as required.

Further information

A PDF version of this information is available in our reference library. Alternatively please contact us with your questions.