Air Force Lab Finds a Simple Way to Support Telework

The threat of an H1N1 flu pandemic last year spurred the Defense Department to plan for the possibility that large numbers of workers would need to work from home if a viral outbreak quarantined employees and required offices to shut down.

But telework on DOD systems usually requires government-furnished equipment to provide a trusted endpoint for remote access. Without a trusted endpoint, remote access opens sensitive DOD systems to the threat of unauthorized intrusions and the loss of sensitive data. DOD wanted a more practical method than providing computers for each worker on short notice.

“The idea of telework is not new,” 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 challenge is to enable telework for workers at home without buying them a computer."

As luck would have it, the needed tool was already available: Lightweight Portable Security. LPS is a simple, inexpensive tool to create trusted endpoints for government and the public. It is bootable, open-source software that can be used with most Windows, Macintosh or Linux computers to create a nonpersistent trusted end node for secure browsing, cloud computing or network access. It boots a Linux operating system from a LiveCD and installs nothing on the client computer, running only in RAM to bypass any local malware and leave no record of the session.