The goal of the NRL secure middleware project (SINS) is to develop infrastructure for the deployment and protection of time- and mission-critical applications on a distributed computing platform, in a hostile computing environment such as the Internet, while using unreliable or untrusted COTS components. In this project, we are rethinking basic ways in which distributed applications are developed, deployed, configured, and maintained. Such a methodology and infrastructure are crucial for the deployment of mission-critical applications in a collaborative environment spanning multiple sites, by multiple agencies, and across multiple enterprises.