While the federal government has been implementing telework strategies for some time, it wasn’t until the threat of a H1N1 flu pandemic last year that the Defense Department began thinking very seriously about the need for large numbers of employees working from home. The main obstacle, however, has been having a trusted endpoint for remote access that prevents unauthorized intrusions and the loss of sensitive data.
The answer came from the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Software Protection Initiative, which produced the Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) tool, which creates trusted endpoints for remote access.
LPS is open-source software that can be used with most Windows, Macintosh or Linux computers to create a non persistent trusted end node for secure browsing, cloud computing or network access. By operating off a live CD and Linux operating system, it installs nothing on the client computer and runs only in the computer’s RAM, in order to bypass local malware and leave no record of the session.
“The challenge is to enable telework for workers at home without buying them a computer,” said Richard Kutter, senior electronics engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s office that manages the Director of Defense Research and Engineering’s Software Protection Initiative (SPI). “The concept of a boot CD met that bill easily,” Kutter told Federal Computer Week.
Approved by DOD’s CIO in December 2009 for continuity of operations, LPS Remote Access is specifically created for governments and is available for all federal agencies and contractors. It creates a virtual government-furnished equipment node on a private computer and is now used with more than 30 DOD organizations by more than 58,000 employees. The free public version, LPS-Public, has been downloaded more than 35,500 times from the SPI website since 2008. A version of LPS Remote Access is in development for the Cyber Command, which was recently established at Fort Meade, Md.
While the H1N1 pandemic never materialized as originally thought, the LPS-Remote Access did prove to be valuable during “Snowmageddon”, the back-to-back snowstorms that shut down much of the nation’s capital in February and stranded many workers at home. The tool worked as expected, Kutter said.
