Army establishes Infowar "DMZ"

The Army plans to establish network security demilitarized zones (DMZs) at all its bases worldwide as part of a plan to beef up its cyberdefenses against network intrusions and attacks.

The DMZs are planned under the Network Security Improvement Program (NSIP), which was designed by the office of the Army's director of information systems for command, control, communications and computers, which is headed by Lt. Gen. William Campbell. Under NSIP, all Army bases and posts will have to physically separate public servers from those providing access to private Army intranets, according to an Army-wide message.

That message defined an information DMZ as "an electronic information area physically or logically separated from [the Army base] into which such systems are placed that have primary interface requirements with systems or users external [to the base]. The purpose of the DMZ is to provide a defined and controlled degree of access to information systems and services."

The NSIP message also stated that bases could establish multiple DMZs with varying degrees of security, depending on the amount of access internal Army information systems require to systems on public networks, such as the Internet, with all servers protected against known vulnerabilities associated with operating systems and hosted applications.

The message added that the Army eventually intends to establish a "more restrictive Army[-wide] DMZ," but did not provide any further details.