News
NSA Teams Up with Sun on OpenSolaris Security
- By Becky Nagel
- March 17, 2008
Sun Microsystems and the National Security Agency (NSA) announced last week
that they are working together to develop new security tools for the OpenSolaris
operating system.
The project, which will be developed through the OpenSolaris community, will focus on integrating mandatory access control (MAC) via Flux Advanced Security Kernel (Flask) architecture and Type Enforcement. It's a task that NSA researchers have already been working on, according to the release.
"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, in a
press release announcing the project. "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 U.S. government
infrastructure."
"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," commented Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz in the same release. "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."
More information on this OpenSolaris project can be found here.
About the Author
Becky Nagel is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Enterprise Computing and Education Groups, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital strategy for the groups. She also serves as executive editor the ECG Web sites, and you'll even find her byline on PureAI.com, the ECG group's newest site for enterprise developers working with AI. She recently gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web technology may impact publishers' bottom lines. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.