internetnews.com: Linux Gets Security Boost from NSA

“Most stories about government deployments of Linux involve a
distributor helping various federal and municipal agencies install
the open source operating system. But in this case, a federal
agency is helping Linux.

“The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also known as the
codemakers and codebreakers cryptologic division within the
Department of Defense, has helped to harden Linux with
newly-released Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) kernel
modifications.

“The latest release, which updates the base kernel to 2.6.3 and
2.4.24, contains numerous significant improvements to security in
the open source operating system. The SELinux improvements mark a
major breakthrough for Linux. Because of the NSA’s contributions to
the kernel, the new security features will now show up in
mainstream distributions of Linux.

“‘Conditional policies are significant and also networking hooks
were added, which makes SElinux all that much more powerful,’
Joshua Brindle, hardened Gentoo Linux Project Leader and the NSA’s
SELinux contributor, told internetnews.com…”

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