T3: Secure, Scalable, Distributed Data Movement and Remote System Control for Enterprise Level Cyber Security

Enterprise level cyber security requires the deployment, operation, and monitoring of many sensors across geographically dispersed sites. Communicating with the sensors to gather data and control behavior is a challenging task when the number of sensors is rapidly growing. This paper describes the system requirements, design, and implementation of T3, the third generation of our transport software that performs this task. T3 relies on open source software and open Internet standards. Data is encoded in MIME format messages and transported via NNTP, which provides scalability. OpenSSL and public key cryptography are used to secure the data. Robustness and ease of development are increased by defining an internal cryptographic API, implemented by modules in C, Perl, and Python. We are currently using T3 in a production environment. It is freely available to download and use for other projects.