“I recently attended a DARPA workshop which focused on high
security open source operating systems. It turns out that parts of
the U.S. government are really interested this topic; having an
operating system with the necessary high-security features which
they need, and for which source code is available, would be a
really good thing for them. Among other things, for example, it
would mean that they wouldn’t have to live in terror about what
might happen if Sun, IBM, SGI, et. al decided to pull the plug on
Trusted Solaris, Trusted AIX, or Trusted IRIX. And they’re serious
enough that DARPA’s willing to throw money at the problem.”
“While I was at this workshop, I met some folks from the NSA and
they told me about a really neat project that they’ve been working
on, called Security-enhanced Linux. One of the cool things about it
is that it separates enforcement and policy. So selinux can easily
support many different security policies, from the old (some would
say outdated/silly) Multi-Level Secure/Bell-LaPadula model, to
Domain-Type enforcement and Rule-Based Access Control models. So if
you think that high-security features means the old silly, Secret /
Top Secret / CMW bullshit, and needing to make sure that Secret
windows don’t get expose events from Top Secret windows, think
again. A number of folks have found Domain Type Enforcement and
Rule-Based Access Control systems very useful for securing Web
servers and other real world systems.”
“The NSA folks just recently got permission to make their stuff
available on the Web. It’s just a proof of concept, and no doubt a
lot of changes will need to made before people will accept
integrating it into the kernel, but they have released a working
system (both kernel and userspace patches — RPM’s aren’t quite
ready yet) based on Linux 2.2 and RedHat 6.1. So it’s definitely
worth a look, and in fact some folks with specialized needs might
find it useful, even though it’s a prototype.”