National Security Agency And Sun Microsystems Lead OpenSolaris Community Project To Advance Mandatory Access Controls
14 March 2008 
0 views 
One Comment
Research Project to Enhance Existing OpenSolaris Security Functionality
SANTA CLARA, CA March 13, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) and the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) today announced an agreement to jointly work within the OpenSolaris community to research and to develop security enhancements to complement existing OpenSolaris security mechanisms. Both Sun and the NSA will work with the OpenSolaris community to integrate an additional form of mandatory access control (MAC), based on the Flux Advanced Security Kernel (Flask) architecture.
The joint research project is intended to complement the security benefits of the mandatory access controls provided by the Solaris Trusted Extensions feature and will be evaluated by the OpenSolaris community. The Flask architecture supports a wide range of security policies, enabling the integration of different policy engines and the configuration of the security policy to meet the specific security goals for a wide range of computing environments.
“The National Security Agency is recognized as one of the most respected authorities in the field of information technology security,” said Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief executive officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. “The combination of the NSA’s expertise and Sun’s 18 years of experience in delivering mandatory access control solutions, along with its commitment to the open standards community, provides the basis for investigating the use of the Flask functionality with the OpenSolaris operating system. This is an opportunity to improve the security of an already robust OpenSolaris environment in a manner that may benefit government and commercial customers alike.”
“NSA is pleased that the work of its research organization in the area of secure computing is being used as a foundation for secure solutions by industry,” said Dick Schaeffer, chief of NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate. “We are committed to promoting transfer of those technologies to the private sector to improve the assurance of commercial products that are becoming more critical to the future of the US Government infrastructure.”
OpenSolaris Community
OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems in 2005 to build a developer community around the Solaris Operating System (OS). It is aimed at developers, system administrators, students and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. As of November 2007, there are more than 80,000 community members registered on OpenSolaris.org. The OpenSolaris User Group community is an active and growing collaboration with dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects being created on OpenSolaris.org.
Tags: ATI, chief executive, chief executive officer, collaboration, DIC, expertise, Future, Hat, kernel, Mac, nasdaq, Office, Open Source, open source project, operating, operating systems, Red, Security, security mechanisms, solution, source, sun microsystems, system, technology, WAN, XRelated posts
[...] DTI - Fort Lauderdale Computer Services wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt Research Project to Enhance Existing OpenSolaris Security Functionality SANTA CLARA, CA March 13, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) and the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) today announced an agreement to jointly work within the OpenSolaris community to research and to develop security enhancements to complement existing OpenSolaris security mechanisms. Both Sun and the NSA will work with the OpenSolaris community to integrate an additional form of mandatory access contro [...]
Leave your response!