NSA to Work with Sun, OpenSolaris to Enhance Security
Thursday, March 13th, 2008United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) will be working with Sun and the OpenSolaris community to develop security enhancements to complement the security benefits of the mandatory access controls provided by the Solaris Trusted Extensions feature. The plan is to integrate an additional form of mandatory access control (MAC), based on the Flux Advanced Security Kernel (Flask) architecture.
“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,” said Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO, Sun. “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.”
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.