IBM developerWorks: Uncovering the secrets of SE Linux: Part 1

[ Thanks to Shailendra for this link.
]

“If you haven’t been following the cryptography area lately, let
me assure you that this action by the NSA was the crypto equivalent
of the Pope coming down off the balcony in Rome, working the crowd
with a few loaves of bread and some fishes, and then inviting
everyone to come over to his place to watch the soccer game and
have a few beers. There are some things that one just never expects
to see, and the NSA handing out source code along with details of
the security mechanism behind it was right up there on that list.
Up to this point, the NSA has embodied in itself the classic Cold
War paranoia imperative of the past 50 years (“If you knew what we
knew, you’d agree with us”). To see it spewing source like some
long-haired Stanford student was enough to make for uncontrollable
twitching.”

“But, they seem to mean it.The distribution .tgz file
contains no secret Trojan horse that reads the data on your hard
disk and then sends it all back to Fort Meade. There’s no way to
hide a trap door in code that all can comment upon and analyze. It
is true that the NSA does need a secured OS to do that voodoo that
they do so well, and they seem to have plans to actually use SE
Linux internally. By incorporating a commercial product called
NetTop, it’s been reported that the NSA will replace several
physically separated computers (this implies the “air gap” method
of operational security — differing levels of security on
physically separated systems) with one box running SE Linux.”

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