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NSA Releases High Security Version Of Linux
tytso writes: "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 So selinux can easily support many different security policies, from the old (some would say outdated/silly) Multi-Level Secure/Bell-LaPadula model, to Domain-Type enforcement and Rule-Based Access Control models.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.
Of course, the source code is all there, and we're encouraged to look at and audit the code. So paranoiacs who think that the NSA is trying to infiltrate trap doors into the Linux kernels needn't worry. (Besides, it's a different part of the government who's interested in spying on U.S. citizens, and it's much more efficient for them to break into your house, and insert a wiretapping device between your computer and your keyboard as part of a black bag job. :-)
The Web site is http://www.nsa.gov/selinux. I think it's really great that some folks at NSA's Information Assurance Research Office (IARO) have made this contribution to the Linux community. They're really nice folks (even if they can't talk about a lot of what they do at work :-).
P.S. Apparently it's not easy to get stuff published by the NSA, since their entire culture, not surprisingly, is based around not letting stuff out. This Web page went up a few days ago, and then some bureaucrats made the folks in the IARO take it down temporarily, much to their disappointment. At the moment it looks like they've finally crossed all of the bureaucratic t's and dotted all of the bureaucratic i's. But just in case, it might not be a bad idea if someone mirrored the entire tree just in case some flack in some other part of the agency tells them to take it down again....
"
IIRC, GPL says that you do not have to release stuff you created based on GPLed software. It says that you have to release the source code whenever releasing your stuff to public.
You need to educate yourself about punch card. Sometimes one person's chad ends up in another person's hole. The second person, through no fault of her own, is thus denied her right to vote.
Voter error? Supervisor of Voters error in my opinion for having such junk. Just because a system is automated doesn't make it reliable. If Florida had used paper ballots then every valid vote would have been counted, and Al Gore would have been president.
Admit it. The voting machine companies are palming off junk on the public. What if Microsoft sold you MS-DOS 2.0 and claimed it was state-of-the-art. That is what the voting machine companies are doing when they sell these horrid, unreliabel machines that steal people's votes. And install an imposter as President.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
"Are you implying that slackware 7.1 is a secure system? Have you audited the entire distribution yourself? Can you honestly say that you trust your distribution to be 100% secure?"
Have you? And it's true, *in general*, more secure systems are more difficult to use. Try jacking up the kernel security level in any BSD and see how much stuff you would use normally breaks. There are lots of things you can do in most unices that you can't do in OpenBSD, due to them not being the most secure practices in the world - this makes the system more secure, and less usable.
There is a tradeoff, and you need to find the balance that is appropriate for your needs - developers also need to work on making their OSes security features more useable. Argus Pitbull is one of the most usable AND secure TOS add-ons I've seen, but it's still more difficult to use than your average everyday UNIX.
-lx
Hey, the whole effort is only in prototype stage. They've probably been working on it for a while, and released what they had. You can probably be sure they will integrate their changes into a more current kernel.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
You might want to just stop by the State Dept., they "lose" them all the time, as in: "Would anyone who's found a laptop with top-secret information please return it to the security desk as soon as possible?"
Or, if you're a Brit apparently MI5 does the same thing.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Perhaps Linux over BSD et al 'cause they had it handy? Nothing more sinister, nothing more simple?
There's two sorts of projects: Those that start out with a committee, a budget, a goal & a process. Then there's a couple of hackers playing around with some tech that came in the door, making a tweak here, making a tweak there, realizing they might have something then writing it up & getting official approval to go ahead with whatever.
It may have been been by plan that Linux got used, or it may have been just what they were playing with the clouds parted in just the right day, things clicked & they got a go-ahead.
There's a lot of bright folks who "work in Maryland" (as in don't-ask-me-details) and their internal culture, while security-obsessed, is also supposed to be pretty free & open to new ideas. Since they've got lots of spare IQ points floating around, budgets aren't a terribly over-riding concern & their mandate is to know all about lots of things (especially stuff like OS's) it's hardly suprising they've been playing with Linux. Heck, it was likely a directive from some (not so) pointy-haired-boss.
The interesting thing is that they're releasing this to the outside world. That means that either the institution thinks doing so would improve the US's security in some way or there's a bunch of geeks in there who *really* want to contribute.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Oops--I was careless with my wording.
I meant, of course, that Apache doesn't deserve much credit if any for the 'opening' of NSA. They deserve tons of credit for creating a stable, robust, cross-platform (!), and free app which runs the majority of the world's web sites; and successfully flies in the face of Microsoft. Kudos to them for that!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Actually, they CAN'T release it under GPL! Huh? It's worse (better?) than that - It's public domain! We PAID for it.
Yes, to the extent that the work is done by government employees, this is true --- however, since it is based on GPL'ed code, only the changes to the code are in the public domain. The overall piece of work is still covered by the GPL. This is part of the "infectious nature" of the GPL.
Also, there's an absolutely trivial way to get around the "work done by government workers must be in the public domain". You just simply hire government contractors to do the work for you, in which case the rule doesn't apply any more. This is a really nasty loophole, especially since many senior government employees get tired of getting paid sh*t wages, and simply resign, and start working for a government contractors, who (after taking a cut, of course) resells that persons time back to the government at a much higher rate. It's a 100% lose all around for the taxpayer. We end up paying more for the same person's work, with a percentage cut being paid to the a third party as sheer overhead, and the work doesn't get have to get released into the public domain any more (the government contractor can resell code developed at government expense as some propietary, commercial product.) Lovely, eh? All because the idiots in Congress aren't willing to pay government workers --- especially in a hot field like software engineering --- what they're worth.
If you'll note on the NSA SE Linux web page, you'll see that some of the work was indeed done by contractors. Fortunately, thanks to the GPL, the overall work still has to be released under the GPL, if it's going to be released at all.
I'm sure including these was to provide a backdoor in case the product got into the hands of the enemies.
"Sir, Saddam has Secure Linux running, what should we do?"
"Does he still have rsh running and wu-ftpd?"
"Sir, let me say that you are a true genius."
The only thing they could do is license the diffs as public domain. They can't relicense the kernel as public domain since it's already licensed under the GNU GPL and they have no authorization to relicense it under different terms. Government agencies have to play by the same rules as everyone else -- the GPL grants no special permissions to military agencies.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
I'm not the most trusting person of the US Government, but, of course, it was the founder father who said don't trust the government. However, I respect the NSA and known people who work inside of NSA, one guy was friends with a top sysadmin in the NSA NOC. These guys were highly respected, highly trust worlthy people who stricly kept to thier outh.
I don't adgree with all of the NSA ops, but this one I do. I see highly unlikey that the NSA would "plant" bugs in open sourced code. That would be stupid. Even though we belive the NSA, CIA, FBI is sometime above the law, they have to follow laws (I'm about to go to court fighting unlawful action of a police officer). So why would they do such a thing. Everybody know this code will be audited, I know I will audit it myself, so why put bugs or backdoors into the code? Somebody will find it. If there is back doors in the code, that would be one of the dumpest thing the NSA has ever done.
In other words if they modified Linux for internal security, everyone in the NSA could get a copy with out the NSA needing to release the sources to the world.
Contributions from government agencies have benefitted the Linux community as a whole in the past - NASA contributed some great work on the Linux ethernet drivers I use at work. I am sure everyone will benefit: the NSA gains the advantage of peer review of their security tweaks and the community receives the source code to incorporate if they so choose.
"As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
I'm not entirly sure why our friends to the north are treated differently, it may have something to do with having a "free" boarder between us. (Some people also therorize that it is because Canada is the "51st state" ;-)
I don't think the Queen of England (or a Canadian for that matter) would have much luck being hired by the NSA, but the Canadian would have much greater luck, being "trusted". Looking on their web page, any and all positions avaliable with the NSA, require you to be a US citizen (http://www.nsa.gov/programs/employ/index.html) as well as get a background check.
Phil's right on target. Microsoft is in over it's head, with the anti-trust case and all. But this is going to kill them! Plus, the so-called Senator from Microsoft (Slade Gorton of Washington) is gone, except he's replaced by Maria Cantwell, a Real Networks Exec!
Oh it just gets way too complicated because then you have to add mods like:
Score +1 Optimistic
Score -1 Naive
Score -3 AOL user level of naivety
Score -5 I believe the government really cares about my needs naivety
You see, it just gets too wierd when you try to bring balance to the force, (or farce(or schwartz))...
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
Yeah. So?
geez. will this not end? We have a very simple system. a machine looks at the votes. the machine is not biased. the machine counts only votes that are absolutely a positive vote. there is no question about this fact. Unfortunately, some people are unable to read directions, and then bitch about thier own incompetence. It amazes me that these people are able to drive cars, but can't seem to puch out the right hole.
.e.
www.perceive.net
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
First sign: Courts finding Microsoft guilty of leveraging a monopoly
Second Sign : NSA releasing information to the public about security
Third sign : Rivers turn to blood
The end is coming just one more sign
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
I found this block of code in stdio.h:
#ifndef SECRETBACKDOOR
#define SECRETBACKDOOR 23
#endif
I may be paranoid, but that seems a little suspicious...
I'd rather be a unix freak than a freaky eunuch
Ewige Blumenkraft!
This seems counterproductive, in my opinion. They could have just as easily contributed to the TrustedBSD project. If they had done that, then their code could have actually been used in more than just one operating system, instead of just Linux, due to the incompatibilities between the GPL and the BSD license.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Whoops... I should actually review my posts, before hitting submit.
What I meant to say was that you claim is that it is necessary for a vote to be properly prepared for the machine to count it, while the Gore camp claims it is not sufficient for a vote to be properly prepared for the machine to count it. I meant to add the most important point: these two statements do not contradict each other.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Oh yes, how can I forget that? Laziness is, of course, the father of invention.
:)
But there's a good laziness and there's a bad laziness.
When laziness prompts you to find a better, more efficient, and often ingenious way to tackle the problem, it's grand. But when you don't implement a specific sanity check, or a buffer length check because of laziness, then it's a bad thing (tm).
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
They don't HAVE to release any changes they make to GPL software, like Linux, unless they're selling it to someone.
Right?
Wrong.
They have to release the changes they make to whomever they distribute it.. so if they give/sell/lend their distro to someone, they have to give them the source code to their changes.
Mirror being built Here.
> Maybe he got more votes, maybe he didn't.
Actualy, the media are already doing a recount under Florida's extraordinary liberal "Sunshine Laws".
There's a big blustery effort including multiple news publishers and a conservative "research" group, and they're inching along at about 450 ballots a day.
However, The Miami Herald is going it solo, and using their brains. They have already done a whole county using an optical scanner, which not only helps with speed, but also reduces subjectivity.
Guess what? That single county turned up 130 more votes for Gore. Stay tuned for more. At least until the Republicans get Scalia to order it stopped and the ballots destroyed.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But you don't have to worry about hidden trojans in binaries that aren't released. That kind of makes it a moot point.
Either they release it, and have to release the code, or the don't release it, and you dont' have to worry.
...next week the government will take away your right to use it :)
...just be sure to comment out "backdoor.h" before compiling anything...
Linux is very secure and us free too. When I use microsoft it freezes up all the time and is easily hacked into. Linux is a very safe way to make or read secure documents.
The NSA is giving out free information for the public (unlike Bill Gates), why not just take advantage of it?
The way your talkign it sounds like your cousins with Bill!
My office is currently migrating our network from an older technology to PC-based tech and I've been pulling my hair out with these guys about their choice of operating system and application software. You guessed it: Micro$oft. Why? Because Linux, despite its virtues, raises the hackles of too many old-timers who still believe in security through obscurity.
This release by the NSA lends legitimacy to the security claims of Linux proponents. Old-timers can feel good because the NSA "endorses" the use of Linux and the rest of us can finally get a chance to use Linux in government projects. As other posters have mentioned, the source code will be available for perusal to calm the fears of anyone fearing Trojan Horses. If that is your fear, you are missing the point! The point is that Linux is making it into US Government Machines. If the US Government wants to spy on itself, there are easier ways to do it than to trap an custom version of Linux! C0deM0nkey "Doh! Forgot my password! -- I'm not an AC! Really!"
yeah, that's the one.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
The problem with the electoral college isn't the idea of breaking the country into small ridings, many of which a party/person must win to be elected. That makes sense, that's what keeps politicians visiting small states even though they could win with only bigger states if all votes were pooled.
/. recently, but that's a minor problem next to corruption and the EC not being mandated to follow the wishes of the people.
But, the system is broken when it comes to the application of these state votes.
The electoral college voters aren't required to vote the way the voters in their state voted. If the EC wanted, they could reverse a 99% popular vote.
That's the part that should be thrown out, an EC voter who doesn't vote the popular vote should be considered to have committed an offense on the level of vote tampering.
But then, with those votes guaranteed to go for the popular vote, we could ditch the whole EC step and just put all of the state's votes directly towards the winner of the popular election.
I know that's not what happened in Florida, but it's the biggest problem in the electoral part of USA politics.
(The other biggest problem, imho, is that campaign contributions are considered bribery, and taking them isn't considered treason.)
I think the USA (and Canada) would both benefit from a better system of actually casting votes, as have been outlined on
Have you?
No, I haven't. I place a specific amount of trust in the systems I set up and a specific amount of faith in my abilities as a sysad. If anything looks peculiar or out of place, I place faith in my abilities to find any security issues in my setup and/or responsible code.
And it's true, *in general*, more secure systems are more difficult to use.
Yes, I'll agree with you, in general, they are. My point is that they don't *have* to be and just because a majority of them *are*, doesn't mean a well-designed secure system neccessarily be user unfriendly.
Try jacking up the kernel security level in any BSD and see how much stuff you would use normally breaks.
Oh I have. Case in point: trying to run X under FreeBSD with the default kernel security level. It confused me the first time I tried it, but after mucking around in the system, I found out why the X server was dying at the point it tried to open the console. I adjusted my kernel.securelevel to compensate.
There are lots of things you can do in most unices that you can't do in OpenBSD, due to them not being the most secure practices in the world - this makes the system more secure, and less usable
Very valid point. We don't have to keep the scope to UNIX though. I'm talking about the security of any computerized system, really. But, perhaps we've gotten away from the security controls the UNIX model provides. Whatever happened to the principle of least privilege anyway?
If you ask me, vendors nowadays are placing too much trust in the programmers.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
What do you mean by "operate"? They are in Langly, VA. Last time I drove by on the GW parkway they were in the US.
~Sean
The only way I see this happening is if someone brought the machine before the NSA with the power supply removed.... -- Sigmentation fault
Nothing wrong with x86 hardware - if it's in a Beowulf cluster....
(*flees*)
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
The OpenBSD SMP branch is probably just waiting for code from NetBSD (where SMP is being worked on.)
They are, in effect, doing what they are meant to be doing: protecting the citizens of the U.S., but in an open manner that takes advantage of a larger community of contributors.
This is a "Good Thing" (TM)
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
given the GPL, it makes it kinda scary that they had to get permission to make it available over the web..
Not really... They'ed only have to make the source available to those who they'ed distributed binaries. It could be argued that agents in their employ wouldn't be entitled to the source anyhow, since they're just using the computers with the whatever software the NSA had decided to install.
Even in the most lenient of senses, still, the only people at the NSA who would be entitled to see the source code at this point are the developers who've created test builds of the OS, and the people that test it. No one else.
You or I can build a piece of GPLed software and never, ever release the source code to anyone, just as long as we don't release the binaries to anyone either... That's not breaking the law at all, according to the GPL, and there isn't a way that the GPL should be extended so that it would be a violation.
Sorry, chumpy, but more secure doesn't necessarily mean less usable. There are much better methods for security than those used today. Also, do you REALLY think NSA wrote Security Linux for the average desktop user? Can't use IRC.. give me a break.
Whatever your opinion of the NSA might be, this is going to be a real boost to fighting the argument that "an open source operating system can't be secure."
While I agree with you, it's important to make the distinction between an operating system which is secure, and an operating system which has high-security features. After all, this is based on Red Hat 6.2, and if the version of WU-FTPD they used happens to have some stack overruns, you can still break into the darned thing. Of course, the fact mandatory access controls are in place means that the attacker can't do as much damage, but letting someone have shell access even on a trusted OS is still a bad thing.
Having a high-security operating systems means that you both have to have the right set of features, *and* you still have to worry about fixing all of those little annoying stack overruns and format string bugs. Both parts of the story are very important.
Just go to the bars in Georgetown where the younger NSA members hang out, but them a few brews, and in an hour or two they're giving you their lifestory, and handing out floppies of classified algorithms.
All they really want is a little human warmth.
Actually, I don't think the software on the stealth bombers is pd. Quite likely, (in the case of the F117), it is the IP of Lockheed-Martin
But, perhaps we need a bit of clarification. If the United States publicly releases something that you or i would be able to hold a copyright on, the man cannot copyright it. It is public domain because it was paid for with tax dollars, and expended solely government time. No one said they had to release it, save the GPL which obligates them to release the source if they release binaries. Of course, it you read the post to which I originally responded, you would have noticed the poster saying something about the government releasing binaries. Well, if the US government creates, entirely on its own without the use of subcontractors, a piece of software, and allows me to use it, I as a taxpaying American citizen have the right to ask for, and the government has an obligation to produce, the source code for whatever it has given me, because it is already mine in the first place. I don't see them giving me (or selling me for that matter) an F117 anytime soon, though if they did, I'd probably ask to see the source. I don't see myself getting my hands on carnivore, so the same thing applies. However, this "NSALinux", I can acquire. And as long as they're claiming that it was done entirely on government time, their modifications are public domain.
I can do that with the GPL too, but I'd have to show show the NSA (well, anyone) any changes I make to the code.
Understandably, the NSA doesnt want to see their code modified for nefarious purposes. Under the GPL you would (1) have to disclose the source and (2) find assasins parked outside your window.
I prefer the BSD license over the GPL but every license has its application and the GPL is ideal for this particular example.
--
--
Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.
The only thing I can think of at the moment is how bad this is going to piss off Microsoft. Doesn't Microsoft have a web page someplace dedicated to dissing Linux? Isn't security one of Microsoft's hot buttons?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
The NSA would also be forced, under the GPL, to release all source code for their distribution. That makes planting a trojan very unlikely, as you could compile from source if you don't trust the NSA's binaries.
I would guess that the requirements for this projects were something like this:
1. Get the public to harden their systems before the Chinese, or the Russians, or any of a dozen other countries with computer warfare military units, penetrates enough systems to make infowar a practical venture.
2. Get it adopted without a heck of a lot of vendor threats/handholding (probably why it's open source)
3. Greatest good for the greatest number of systems (Linux)
Sound good?
so, what, this is OpenBSD with an ext2fs file system, /usr/include/linux, and a /proc?
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
I wouldent say JUST as rootabe, as the standard RH7 install has about... 13 or so public exploits, as opposed to slaks 1 [suid perl, what my comment was about].
--Semi-----------------------
|semi@nix.org
|#resistance irc.otherside.com
ln -s
The NSA is actually encouraging people to get involved with the discussion and source code of the OS at this link! Who would of thought the NSA would do something like this? Sure creates a little bit of a different picture of the big security bully that we've all grown to hate.
Bill Gates...eat your heart out: "Linux was chosen as the platform for this work because its growing success and open development environment provided an opportunity to demonstrate that this functionality can be successful in a mainstream operating system and, at the same time, contribute to the security of a widely used system."Please take a look at my post in the context of the thread to which I was replying.
The AC who posted the original comment said that he would not run a version of Linux distributed by the NSA.
Under this scenario, if the NSA were to distribute thier Linux "version", then they WOULD have to release the source, and that would essentially take care of the problem.
Thanks.
"It seems these days that every document available from Gov't websites is available as Text, PDF, and WordPerfect. WordPerfect is available for Linux. I don't know about that for OpenBSD."
If OpenBSD's Linux emulation is anything like FreeBSD's, then running WordPerfect for Linux on OpenBSD wouldn't be a problem.
Gotcha, since the original post was a sub 1 post, I didnt' see it.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Does the USsian goverment think that Canada belongs to them
Yes. Oh, it's more nunanced than that, but Canada is a military and economic appendage of the United States, and English-speaking Canada isn't any more culturally distinct from the U.S. than Texans, Californians, Rhode Islanders, and Michiganians are from each other. While Canada isn't states 51 through 60, it might as well be.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
To whom do you refer about asserting the GPL? I would hold that if the NSA wishes to distribute its modifications, it is bound by the GPL to make the source available for them. However, since the initial source was copyrighted by Linus Torvalds, et. al., they could enforce this. We've already agreed that the NSA modifications are in the public domain, something which is inherently compatible with my reading of the GPL. So, we've really come around full circle from where the /. article started. The NSA is doing what they're obligated to do, both under the licence they received with the software, and according to US copyright laws regarding the US holding copyrights.
Unless they write their own programs for it and only release binaries. You put any license on a program you write from scratch since it is yours.
is that Linus gets his name in the copyright notice at the bottom of an NSA web page!
They don't have to release source unless they release binaries, is the best I understand it (it may well be more complex than that, I believe it is).
I think basically, anyone that comes into posession of binaries had to be able to come into posession of source. Perhaps this means that if you only give it to a friend, you only have to give it to them, I dunno. But they could give it to anyone, and source too.
~Sentry21~
think of all the money they save with all us crypto geeks hacking at their code testing for bugs,
Yea, I can visulize Theo from OpenBSD thinking "Hey, lets download software to find bugs to save the Americans money. It is the least I can do, with all the quality television the US sends our way."
The NSA actually contribute a surprising amount to our open knowledge. They're not exactly a University department, but there are several examples.
--
Xenu loves you!
This one being from the NSA, I have no doubt in my mind that people are going to go over this with the finest-toothed comb there ever was, simply because of paranoia and that special NSA mistique.
That's a good thing, by the way. That review alone could improve Linux security to possibly surpass that secure BSD distro (netbsd?)
-------
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Hey, I resemble that remark! The C2 system I worked on 3 years ago brought rsh, rlogin AND NFS through formal evaluation.
Oops, sorry, I hit submit too soon. SE Linux is based on Red Hat 6.1, not 6.2.
And furthermore, the important thing to remember is that this is a prototype. Hopefully it will spark discussions about adding some or all of these features into Linux 2.5, and how to do so in a clean way. I've talked with the folks at the NSA, and that's one of their main goals behind doing this release.
We don't live in a democracy, because Al Gore who probably got the most votes in Florida didn't win!
We live in a REPUBLIC!! Not a democracy!! Catch a clue! It doesn't matter who won the popular vote, only the electoral votes count!
People from places as "english" as the Isle of Man and Cornwall would make a similar distiction too.
But the Welsh do actually have a language (which few speak), a flag (very cool dragon) and a Legislative Assembly which is normally best at comic relief
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
I agree that this is a very nice thing to see.
With the recent increases of cyberattacks on sites this is a very good thing to have happen. I happen to be sitting on a pice of backbone that is shared with some government offices and when the Washington State web site was clobbered my business took a hit from all the flooded traffic.
By offering to raise the security bar like this we all will be better off.
they don't have a dual licence option here.
You've got to code from the ground up if you want to do that.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
--
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Actually I believe that it is Tempest and the shielding against the RF sniffing is called Tempest Shielding.
Yet, I will be the first to admit that I don't know that for sure since the last time I read up on that was back in 1992 when I ran my Anarchist BBS and worried more than I do now about such things...
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
What about the huge campus they have out near Dulles?
The one that got them in so much trouble because it obviously cost so much more than they could afford in their "official" budget? Nothing like a little ostentation for a secret agency.
No, wait. I'm thinking of the NRO.
They're the folks who didn't officially exist until a few years back, when someone FOIA'd em out of hiding.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
Of course you don't use their precompiled binaries for anything! Jeez! And good god, they aren't out to get you here. They just wanted a good secure OS that they could modify, so they modified an open OS and gave the changes back, possibly as thanks for writing the OS to begin with. Stop being paranoid.
I wouldn't think that, in this case... Or in any. IF you're making your own product that's never bound to be distributed anyhow, it really doesn't matter what the license is, so long as it allows you access to the source code and the ability to change it and keep those changes. GPL and BSDL both allow for that.
:)
They probably chose Linux over OpenBSD for other reasons... one small one being that Linux scales past a single processor. Another being that there's more application support behind linux. It seems these days that every document available from Gov't websites is available as Text, PDF, and WordPerfect. WordPerfect is available for Linux. I don't know about that for OpenBSD.
And then there's mindshare. There's a much larger community of people out there working on and committed to working on the advancement of Linux than there are in any of the BSD camps. So, they won't have to commit as many resources to the project than they would otherwise, because there's a lot more independant work going on inside the linux community than the BSD's communities (IMHO... don't flame me if you feel i'm wron on that one, please
What about their history? Can you go into more detail?
I think you watched "Enemy of the State" one^H^H^Hfive too many times. Grow up, maybe?
Well is East America still in place? Aren't you seeing cracks on the walls. Hasn't your roof flyed away? Isn't you car laying inside a crack?
Because that is a MOVE. NSA publishing a security system? Think, that's first the setting of a standard. NSA is entering as a player of the security market. A big one. Second it is a risk. NSA is showing its strenghts and weaknesses to everyone. Third NSA is a security arbitrer. Someone will get up and others get real burned on this move. And fourth, NSA makes the security wars more intricted and complex than before. Right now it is not only NSA vs MI*/MOSSAD/FAPSI. This goes farther than old government pitty fights. NSA may be giving a weapon to mobs and terrorists. Or maybe be giving a weapon organisations to figth these rough groups. What will come from this, only the Future will know.
Anyway NSA made a huge move into the pedestal. It is putting itself as one of the biggest security players in the world. From now on we will have to look at NSA when talking about security. Its governmental status was already heavy-weight. Now it starts getting earthquake.
If you pulled your head out of your ass you'd realize that the NSA is not just legally, but as a culture morally compelled not to spy in the US. Knowing some of those guys, they make great efforts not to spy in the U.S.
I have noticed several posts which have expressed some concern with the idea of NSA produced/approved code getting into the kernel, and therefore concievably providing a covert insurgence of back doors.
...Uhm, have you ever read the source for the D. Beckers networking drivers [and derived code]?
/usr/src/linux/drivers/net and run
"grep "National Security Agency" *"
Go to
Oh NO! All of those unaudited strcpy's in kernel space! IEEE! And I thought linux was safe! hehe.
Moderators::Note(humor)
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man sig
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
NORAD is a cooperative effort between the US and Canada. The NSA isn't.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
"If they pull the site again, would that be a violation of the GPL? And could the NSA be sued over it?"
nope... you can download the source code right now. It's then your responsibility for what you do with keeping the code around, not theirs. If Linus wants their code, he needs to download it while it is still there, and if he misses out and they pull both the source and binaries, that's tough luck.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
--
--
Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.
It uses Kernel 2.2.12 and RH 6.1.
Both are old, and both are known to be buggy.
I don't know many people that are (basically) starting the project and making sure that all they do is 'in sync' with the latest releases of everything. Of course they don't have 2.2.18 patch or whatever - it's not fully finished product yet, so why bother to keep masses (that just love the 'latest versions') happy?
From your 'conclusive' article:
A search for "Linux is great" on Google yields 1,080,000 results. A search for "Windows 2000 is Great" yields 1,050,000.
Anybody with half a brain can smell this as a lie. The actual numbers are 7.094 for "Linux is great" and 230 for "Windows 2000 is great".
Regards,
Xenna
Roland Buresund
-- Roland Buresund MBA, MCMI, CISSP
You think that government throwing money towards a "trusted" open source OS will put any kind of pressure on Sun, IBM, and the such?
Maybe not now, but if these project DO see some light of day, Sun, IBM, etc., will have to do something to keep their market share with the government.
--Chemguru
This can only be a Good Thing tm
the more guv depts use linux the better
this would mean the market for surport would go up so more business for folks
but lets hope that all the fools dont bring the website down and spam them
this looks like linux distro by stealth (-;
(the only way it gets into most companys)
I wish them well
regards
john jones
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Uhh... was there a crack of OpenBSD that I didn't catch? The only vulnerability that I know of was the recently found problem with FTPD that ships with OpenBSD and NetBSD. I did not hear of any actual real-life compromises, root or otherwise, related to the vulnerability. If you know of one, please email me, submit the crack to Slashdot, or one of the other main OpenSource OS portals (DaemonNews, Rootprompt, UnixReview etc.) Thanks.
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Slán leat agus go n'eirí an bóthar leat
You can easily secure ANY computer, unplug all cords from it, and hide it behind about 3 miles of concrete everyway, sure, you could not use it but no 'evil h4x0rs' will either. What's my point? The more secure a computer is, the less useable it is. Sure you can keep a computer from crashing as much by never using beta software, but where the fun in that? Have to use at least some bug ware sometime. You could also set it so you have NO ports open, but then you can't get on most irc networks because of no ident... so just stick with slak 7.1 with a chmod'd suid perl
--Semi-----------------------
|semi@nix.org
|#resistance irc.otherside.com
ln -s
who cares how much money they save? Their budget exceeds three times NASA's budget.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Don't you see? It's all a trick! The NSA is obviously going to track down the identities of everyone who downloads selinux, and flag them in a secret database of "potential hackers". Anyone interested in a secure system *must* have something to hide, right?
To cover our tracks, everyone should start posting messages in alt.sex.furry about the "cool new animorphic porn screensaver that you can download from http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/slinux-200012181053-rel ease.tgz -- don't worry about the file size, the pictures will be worth it!" Then their servers will be overwhelmed by irrelevant requests, and the real security freaks will just get lost in the noise.
--
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III / NIC Handle: EMC3
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III
geek ramblings
I see that the astroturfers have some moderator points.
>>Microsoft is rapidly becoming irrelevant. They are to be simultaneously pitied and despised.
Whether anyone actually runs selinux or not, the resource is available. Judging from recent cracks of OpenBSD and security advisories from FreeBSD, the current state-of-the art is far from adequately secure. At least Linux and the BSDs are potentially securable.
You can't run Linux on the Playstation 2!
They contribute to our knowledge when it suits them best. No disrespect to the announcement, which does them much credit, but the past has shown they intend to make everyone's systems so secure that no-one but themselves can crack it. I can do nothing but recommend The Code Book which gives the history of crypto from Ancient Egyptian times until today. The techology may change but the politics don't...
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Without being a bit paranoid, I think you are right. Out of the box, the BSDs, particularly OpenBSD should be more secure, but there is more to be gained by securing Linux than by further securing one of the BSDs. Of course anything actually significant in Linux will be picked up by the BSDs, so OpenBSD will keep its place as the most secure. Oddly enough I expect one of the results of selinux will be more OpenBSD desktops. ;)
selinux was a shared project of the NSA and Secure Computing Corporation (where I am a developer on a different project). The type enforcement model used in the policy engine was originally developed at Secure, and is one of the core technologies of our BSD-based firewall, Sidewinder. While there were people inside the NSA who wanted this code to see the light of day, I'm not confident that it would have been released if the NSA had not been under a contractual obligation (to Secure) to do so. Like I said, though, I'm on a different project, and I may be being too cynical.
The BSD type enforcement code, meanwhile, is stuck in a lovely Catch 22 I'm sure it shares with lots of useful code -- there's not enough demand to release it as a discrete product, but at the same time it's valuable enough that management doesn't want to just release it to the public.
Uh, no, it's not. Tempest is a certification scheme which is designed to prevent your computer from EMITTING rf signals, which could otherwise be intercepted by those guys in the van across from your house. It makes your computer a bit heavier, due to the shielding materials, but much less likely to affect your TV and cordless phones.
And it cooks rice perfectly every time.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I was replying to his comment that they picked Linux over OpenBSD because Linux was open source and OpenBSD was not.
I'm sure they are clever enough to hide weaknesses in code from you, and from me. I doubt very much that they are clever enough to hide weaknesses in code from everybody who reads and post to slashdot.
Its nice to see the government is more interested in security than Microsoft. Maybe Bill Gates can now use Linux as a defense,in his antitrust suit .The NSA is just another agency of the US Government,and when the government starts making a Computer Operating system,and giving it away .Doesnt that make them
(The Government) a competetor ?
Just a thought?
Didn't (or doesn't) Hotmail run on BSD boxes? I can't think of another service where usage accelerated faster. And, IIRC, they didn't really start having problems untill M$ took over.
Give a man a fish, he owes you one fish. Teach a man to fish, collect recurring licensing revenue for life.
Actually, they CAN'T release it under GPL! Huh? It's worse (better?) than that - It's public domain! We PAID for it.
There are other government groups that talk about this. There is a Linux probram called EMC (Enhanced Machine Controler) that has been let out by the government, and there was a whole discussion of the GPL issue, and they said "We can't GPL it, we MUST Public domain it"
Go to www.linuxcnc.org for more details!
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
That's an interesting problem, but I think it applies to closed-source systems too, and possibly worse. At least in the open source world you get a better audit trail of exactly what changes have been made, when and by who. (Well, the authenticity of this is sometimes questionable, but wide and open distribution mediates against subversion to a certain extent.) Diffs are generally available and easier to check for possible compromises than whole systems. There's also an argument that because home-tinkering presents a faster moving target to attackers, their incentive (and our risk) is reduced. Don't rely on it, but it could be true :-)
Many groups already do use signed distribution - it's Debian policy for example for all developers or maintainers to sign anything they put out.
And many groups also maintain at least one previous stable release, with a policy to restrict updates to bug fixes only (or have very good reasons for completely new code). Some even restrict bug fixes to only the most severe bugs, or security-only fixes.
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
I mirrored it here anyway in case they take it back down.
(The mirror is done, and includes all of the files.)
How do you know that they make *all* of their modifications public?
AFAIK, It never existed and no-one, to my knowledge, ever implimented one in the wild. I may be wrong, but I don't even think Ken demonstrated a working model, himself.
It was great fun, back in those days, to set up something that looked like it might be the great Ken Thompson compiler backdoor, but never was.
It was a scheme and nothing more. Unless by "existence" you mean the existence of the possibility of a complier propagated backdoor that doesn't show up in the sources.
It would also have to be sophisticated enough as to hide the existance of the backdoor code in it's own binaries (where they could be found by string searches) since you would want it to be platform independent and couldn't depend on assembly or binary code.
It's worth remembering and always being on the lookout for. :-)
"Linux and the NSA. We know where you want to go today."
or, "Linux and the NSA. Partners against crime".
tigert, where are you? I want T-shirts! I want bumper-stickers!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
The biggest problem I see with security in the open source community is the desire to tinker with the code. When we can find a way to do trusted distribution via signed (by multiple signors) source code packages AND convince people to spend more time on bug fixing than feature adding, then I'll think we'll get somewhere.
Note that the hacked compiler and login weren't actually released anywhere, as Dennis explained when I wrote him last year to ask about it.
:-)
Deja *used* to have the reply, but it appears to be in the old archive, and google couldn't find it either.
Damn. Look for lower case and 40 columns.
Cheers,
-- jra
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American mathematicians only I presume.
well.. lot of NSAers live and play in Columbia and Laurel. Had a young spook neighbor for 7 years. Think we talked 3 times. They just dont talk. Period.
They did not have a hand recount. Five members of the Supreme Court prevented it.
Scalia is at least more upfront about the reasons why than were O'Connor and Kennedy. Scalia said:
1. A hand recount might cause people to question the legitimacy of the winner, meaning that if the hand recount said Gore won and the Supreme Court overruled the result then people would say that Gore actually won the election.
2. It was possible that the hand recounts would turn up legally cast votes which had never been counted for any candidate.
The Supreme Court's ruling was unjust and resulted in the loser of the election being declared the winner by his own campaign manager Kathleen Harris. A travesty. I hope people still remember in 2002 and that Florida will do away with punch card ballots which lose about one percent of the legally cast votes.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
The author mistakenly states that "it's much more efficient for them to break into your house, and insert a wiretapping device between your computer and your keyboard as part of a black bag job. :-)"
Actually, it's much more convenient for them to employ EMF eavsdropping techniques via a van accross the street that picks up each 'click' of the keyboard and each char on the monitor. This is a relatively old technology called Tempest that doesn't even require them to break into your house or have a back door into your system.
But, I'm just nitt-picking I guess...
Oh, and doesn't it sound a little frightening to have a government sponsored O/S? Oh well, I guess I'm just one of those paranoiacs, even though I would rather be an Animaniac...
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
http://www.landfield.com/isn/mail-archive/2000/Oc
...
"We fixed dozens if not over a hundred of format string vulnerabilities," says Aaron Campbell, an OpenBSD developer. "At the time, no exploits for format string problems were available. It was easy to crash programs, but methods for gaining elevated privileges were not publicly known and at the time it was largely theoretical."
...
Despite the effort, crackers still found a way to break into a system. Tuesday the friend of an OpenBSD developer had his OpenBSD 2.7 machine compromised by an exploit of the operating system's "chpass" utility -- a Unix tool that lets users edit database information associated with their account. Somebody had gained root access, the Unix equivalent of system administrator-level control.
...
"Are we surprised? No," says DeRaadt. "Should we have spent time checking each for exploitability? No, that's not the role we can play. And we cannot release a patch for 800 bugs, which may or may not be exploitable. We'd look like jerks."
Campbell says Tuesday's scare reaffirmed his faith in aggressive audits. Even though the bug was not known to be exploitable during the original summer audit, the fact that they identified and fixed it gave them a chance to seek out similar bugs, shoring up future versions of OpenBSD.
----------------
Took a while, but searching though google, I finally found the reference. It stuck in my mind because even OpenBSD can be vulnerable.
If they pull the site again, would that be a violation of the GPL? And could the NSA be sued over it?
That would be another secret evidence trial for sure....
The Code Book doesn't talk about modern crypto much; it's mainly confined to the last chapter, which is mostly about RSA.
I'd like evidence for what you assert. Everyone thought that the DES S-boxes were "cooked" to give the NSA a back door into the cipher, until we discovered differential cryptanalysis and found that the S-boxes had been arranged to lend resistance to it. I think what they have contributed is as strong as they claim it to be.
I'm no fan of the NSA, quite the opposite, but I'd just like to do my bit to resist the spread of crypto-paranoia.
--
Xenu loves you!
Early BSD development - in fact, the very basis for the Internet - was funded by DARPA many moons ago.
By the way, I believe NASA (not NSA) uses/used OpenBSD as they used to run the mirror site that I would always download from - I think this was at Goddard? in Silicone Valley (Sunnyvale/Mountain View area)
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
Cool, thanks much for getting the ref for me... I just use OBSD for a home firewall with no ports except http avail, but it's good (but unnerving) to know about this potential flaw in the event that I ever started using it for anything more. Thanks for going that extra mile for me.
Cheers and best wishes for the season!
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Slán leat agus go n'eirí an bóthar leat
Yeah, just like when they changed the S-boxes in DES before it was released to make it easier for them to crack.
No - wait a minute. That secured DES against differential cryptanalysis, making it harder...
Stop your knee from jerking like that.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
I am not from USA, so I do not know much about NSA (except from reading, NSA key in Win NT etc.). Why they made this linux distro is uder big question. But one thing is sure. You do not have to use the distro but releasing such code in open source is worth a lot. Computer security is very important this days since internet is by default insecure. For linux you do not have a lot of choices in security field (as i know, only source code from Trusted Irix that gives linux C2/B1 is released). So you can read source code and do whatever you want with it.
What the stupid default password in Pirahna "proved" was that system security is an active pursuit, not a passive one. The flaw in the fish only bit people who never changed the password, even when instructed to during installation, never mind on a regular basis as many standard system security practices recommend.
Yes, by all means, do "your own damn auditing", but don't waste your time by doing so before you have an actual policy of secure practices in place to audit.
And be really careful about calling in an outside auditor. You won't get your money's worth if you and your system aren't ready, and you might wind up paying contractor rates to fix really stupid things - anyone who needed an outside auditor to find and fix the Pirahna flaw shouldn't be trusted to carry their own money, let alone their company's.
Whether you love or hate the NSA, this is a good thing for Linux. It's a seal of legitimacy when an agency like the NSA wants to use your OS and needs it to be easier to secure.
If this thing takes off, it's sure to lead to better security in the long run. Short term this might make things worse.
If you have to put your machine on a network, there is some level of security in the anonymity of your OS. If you are running a Unix variant that is not widely distributed with a security model that isn't widely used, the number of hackers who have direct knowledge of how your system works is smaller. If I know what variant you are running and how it works, I have a better chance of uncovering flaws.
If the NSA standard for securing Linux becomes ubiquitous, you will have a large pool of potential hackers with an intimate insight of potential flaws. In the beginning this should uncover many security flaws. It will take time for corrections to be made, but the source code access should insure that there is just as big a pool of people ready to correct flaws. This will lead to a hardening of the new model over time. In the short run, this secured OS may be less secure than its more anonymous cousins. Over time, a widely available, heavily attacked, open source OS should trump any security found in the less common deployments.
It will be ironic if the NSA gives the world an OS that allows individuals the same levels of security that the NSA expects will protect American secrets. The NSAs work may become much harder if other countries start adopting the fruits of NSA labor. Will this be such a bad thing?
The NSA has a mandate to protect the information security of our government. I believe they would interpret that to include protection of the information security of the industrial base that supports our country. I would love to see a group within the NSA charged with working with the open source community to enhance the security of open source software. I would never trust software solely because it comes with a security seal of approval only from an agency which also has other priorities which may be at odds with my privacy. However, I would consider their assurance to be a valuable addition.
I applaud the effort that these people within the NSA who brought this project to light went to. The fact that they have released this work at all is surprising. But they have demonstrated their good faith by honoring the GPL. Bravo.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I'm a big Linux guy, but I have to wonder why the NSA decided to do this at all when they could have just as easily played around with one or all of the BSDs. The licensing is such that they would never have to release their modified code, right?
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I was not aware of a "Trusted Irix".
Even if it exists, AFAIK SGI is switching over to Linux "soon" anyway, so a "Trusted Linux" is a natural progression.
This is great news for Linux...we've had a hard time getting Linux taken seriously where I work because there has been little "solid" government interest outside of clusters.
But being able to use "NSA" and "Linux" in the same sentence (and in print) will ease a lot of fears 'round these parts.
I hope someone out in slashdot land, with the requsite graphics skills, does a spoof of a "NSA Linux" distro.
Maybe a spoof of Austin Powers or something? Yeah Baby! Trusted Linux!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Actually, there are lots of Canadian military posted there. In fact, the Deputy Commander in Chief of NORAD & Vice Commander of the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center are always Canadian Generals (by treaty). Check it out at NORAD.
Not to mention the fact that Larry Wall first came up with Perl when he was working on a NSA project for Burroughs.
Sounds alot to me like they just took rsbac kernel patches and added it the redhat.
meridian at tha.net
To the contrary, the work was done by the NSA. If you look at the Contributors page, you'll see the breakdown of who did what in developing the Security-Enhanced Linux. As far as its predecessors go, the Flask prototype was developed entirely by the NSA and the University of Utah, with most of the security development by the NSA. Secure Computing simply provided technical review and some assurance work. For DTOS, Secure Computing was GIVEN a working prototype of the security-enhanced Mach microkernel and a security server by the NSA, and they then did a clean re-implementation with some simultaneous assurance work. Meanwhile, the NSA did the security development for the Lites Unix single server that ran on the microkernel, including security enhancements to the file system, networking, and process management code. How do I know this? Because I worked on DTOS, Flask, and the Security-Enhanced Linux.
Beautiful hack, but probably cannot be repeated anymore. It requires that both the compiler and the login program come from the same place. Something as trivial as changing login to logon would be enough to break the hack and possibly expose it. The key to the hack is a backdoor in the binary that is not in the source.
Slightly off-topic. There is a very good reason to have backdoors. Much worse than being broken into is permanently locking yourself out.
We already have a BSD whose primary development focus is on security - so why doesn't the NSA concentrate on that, build on that effort that's been going on for years, instead of working with this new and far less mature OS (just because it's popular? Madonna is popular).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Umm.. Because the source code is available?
Nobody said you had to use those packages.
What's new is the underlying security model. If the end-user of the distro is so clueless as to put holes in the system, he deserves what he gets.
Remember - security isn't just software. It's also the guy at the root prompt.
Hmm, first you say:
,
Of course it is possible to have a completely secure and completely usable multi-user system. Where did you get the idea that a secure system is less usable than an unsecure one?
And about the topic of IRC not really working on a secure system you say that...
This is a moot point. IRC is not something you would be running on a mission-critical must-be-secure box. You must also understand that just because a box has no ports open doesn't mean it's secure.
Interesting. I believe that what the author of the original comment meant was just that: when you can't run stuff like IRC (which is, by the way, one of the most important, or at least popular, uses of the Internet), then your system is less usable - plain and simple.
Basically, by that statement, you are supporting the statement of the original comment (if anything, you should've written something like "it's only because IRC is buggy blah blah blah if it would've been implemented right it could've been secure enough etc. etc. etc." - that was your point, no?)
To be honest, the whole comment (except the Slackware part, which I don't really know about) did nothing to prove that the original comment was wrong - so what if insecurity comes from buggy code? It's rather obvious. But the point is as the amount of programs (==code) used grows, so does the probabilty for a bug to surface. That's why people who secure a system usually run the absolute minimum number of programs - and you know that, otherwise you wouldn't have written the stuff about IRC not being something to run on a mission critical secure box. The reason for that is rather obvious as well - it's easier just not to run certain programs (or even whole classes of programs) than to make sure the code is 100% secure, and, in my opinion, making sure all programs are 100-percent-bullet-proof secure is a really waste of time. Not all boxes should be so secure. I don't expect my house to be as secure as an average bank vault, but I do expect it to be much more comfortable. So, secure systems would probably always be less usable (in the way I think the author of the original comment thought about)
But the original comment, though not wrong, was rather offtopic. So what if a secure computer becomes less usable? Wasn't the post about NSA computers? If it was about security of home systems, then maybe it would've been somewhat on-topic (though not very interesting - the whole thing is rather obvious), but as I've already said, it's not. Does the NSA really need stuff like IRC, or almost anything else, if we're on that topic?
Hehe, that's exactly the thing that screwed with me for like half an hour after installing fbsd 4.2. Is there a good way to start xdm and still have the security level at 1? It doesn't seem to work starting it from /usr/local/etc/rc.d...haven't tried /etc/ttys yet. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out that something is failing due to good security practices, though.
It's true that people place a lot of trust in programmers, but there's really not much of an alternative - I'm not good enough a programmer to be able to audit OS code beter than the people who write it. In any event, I'm really looking forward to fbsd5.0, with some of the new TrustedBSD extensions, and more in the future - finally, a trusted OS that will actually be *free*. Woo!
-lx
Naw, the NSA cares about Linux because Linux does not yet have an NSAKey like Windows does. If people start adopting Linux, then they'll have no way to watch them. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
How do you know that they make *all* of their modifications public?
The article says they are releasing the source code to their packages. So if you don't trust their prebuilt binaries, you can always recompile the stuff yourself.
Of course, if they wanted to make hidden modifications, they would probably stick them into the kernel or the compiler (as with the UNIX backdoor a while ago)... But then you still would not be forced to run the kernel they use (you can apply their patches to your own trusted kernel sources), or the compiler they supply.
Is it perfect security? No. Are any other distributions providing perfect security? No. Will it be more trustworthy than some other distributions? Maybe.
It's still just a proof of concept.
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
That is NOT the issue under scrutiny in Florida. Look into it before spouting off, please.
if they can "dissapear" unruly congressmen, they can "dissapear" an unruly Canadian. :)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
We get a more secure linux, and they get a realy secure linux.
Or is that just a dirty rumor?
DT
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Is this thing on? Hello?
I'm pretty sure BSD does not.
FreeBSD does
HEY, GOOD FOR THEM! The government is so far up Bill Gates ass that I think it's great that they are looking at Linux. Please Note: The government is the largest buyer of software in the world, and Bill Gates has gotten most of that money. So, I say we support the NSA's move to Linux as much as possible. I am so tired of writting code for the government that has to run on Microsoft boxes (that doesn't work) that I think it would such a joy to write code for Linux (that would work). Way to go NSA!
Goat Sex link above.
Who the hell modded this ad insightful, I wish I could metamod
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Am I the only one that finds great mirth in the NSA being slashdotted? :-)
SMQ 90AE4B2BC4F6BEAF7340F0B40BA2DEF7340F6BC2D0392
I've established a mirror of the three main packages here: http://mike.akardam.net/dump/selinux/
Except that it's from the US Government, which automatically places it in the public domain.
Or so I'm told.
OpenBSD is open source.
According to the package list it includes rsh and WU-FTPd.
Come on, an ultra-secure system with rsh and WU-FTPd?
Okay, so it says WU-FTPd is untested, but there is no excuse for using rsh.
This makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
This is solid advice, but you do you not agree that open peer review is a valid and useful addition to other security audits? I mean, I would obviously hope that the NSA would not just trust the internet community to vet its software security. But just as the group can ignore what an expert might notice, the reverse can easily be true. The point others are making is that open source doesn't necessarily mean low security, not that open source guarantees high security.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
There's also other simple reasons besides "Linux is the in thing". OpenBSD would probably have been a good place for them to start, except for some serious factors against it. OpenBSD isn't scalable. At all. It's great for small corporate networks, or home firewalls and such, but wiht no plans for SMP in the future, it can't compete as a server environment. OpenBSD is great for IDS sensors, and specific appliance type hardened boxes, but it's not well rounded enough to put into a big multi user production environment. Have you ever heard of any major e-commerce site using OBSD as their primary server software? Then there's the whole problem with Theo not playing well with others. And being Canadian. Because Theo wholly manages the project himself, it would cause issues. I believe the NSA folks are looking to put together something that can go into general release, possibly as an option on any distribution. OBSD can't do this, because a) the NSA would have to pay Theo to audit their code [see how OBSD architecture ports end up getting made.. its interesting], or he wouldn't let them integrate it into his source tree, and B) there's all kinds of weird issues with the project maintainer not being a US national. I'm not knocking OpenBSD. I'm a big supporter. I run it on a lot of appliance type boxes, rnuning security centric tasks. However, don't believe for a second its secure. It requires the same amount of tweaking as any other operating system to get it into shape. I've had OBSD machines get owned before, where there were serious user errors in judgement. Just because there aren't any *remote* exploits, doesn't mean your users aren't going to get drunk and give away their account. Trusted OSes are a little more forgiving when this kind of thing happens. My $.02 . Take it for what its worth. Or ask for change back.
No one ever said we had to use their gcc (scc??).
Like maybe the confirmation isn't an email, but is instead two gentlemen with sunglasses, dark suits and menacing ties who come to you door?
Now why would a couple of bible salesmen care about NSA's Linux?
"We were half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold."
-- Hunter S. Tolkien
Think before you open your mouth and prove what an idiot you are.
Anyone else getting sick of the crap that this "Anonymous Coward" inflicts upon us?
Just my statement: There is a similar solution that has been developed and tested for 4 years (!). You can find it at
http://www.rsbac.org.
Don't get me wrong: I believe it good that NSA goes for secured Linux, it is just that a simple Web search could have brought the two similar approaches together - and saved a lot of double work and diversification.
The current RSBAC version 1.1.0 works with kernels
2.2.17/18, 2.4.0-test11 and -test12.
Several models are included, e.g. a role model and an ACL model. Check it out.
Amon Ott.
The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1.
All that demonstrates is that peoplw with anything useful to do with their time don't waste it on Use(less)net, which is pretty much a dead land these days.
Nothing that has anything to do with reality can be deduced from Usenet post volume. If you need somebody to tell you that you're beyond hope.
Hay thar.
Maybe you missed the part of the article where they will be releasing source code?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
only run it on a computer you built yourself with components you made yourself.
I hope you carefully reviewed all the microcode in the CPU.
You're not connecting that system to any terminal or I/O devices that you don't have a complete understanding of, are you? I'd suggest Morse code as a good I/O terminal, as a morse code key is pretty hard to jigger.
Hay thar.
I think I read somewhere that CINC NORAD rotates between US and Canadian commanders, and the deputy is always from the other partner.
So if CINC NORAD is Canadian *now*, his deputy is American, and next year the CINC will be an American with a Canadian deputy.
This has piqued my intrest enough that I'm going to go look for a link, but I'm pretty sure I have it right.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
will anyone actually trust it. Considering their history, they will have to show us the code. I'm a lot of people will want the code to compile themselves to make sure there isn't anything hidden in a binary.
Because Canada is also part of NORAD (NORth American [Air?] Defense). I don't recall all the details of the arrangment, but it goes back to the early cold war days with the setting up of the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line across northern Alaska and Canada, and various other arrangements that had to do mainly with protecting the US from Russian bombers (and later missiles) that might take the direct route over the North Pole and Canada.
There are even a few Canadian officers routinely posted to the NORAD facility in Cheyenne Mountain, although I don't recall seeing any US military in the "Diefenbunker" underground facility north of Ottawa when I was posted there.
All that said, however, there are plenty of US secrets that Canadians don't have access to.
There's also the recognition that the border between the US and Canada is pretty open both to people and information, and that strong encryption can benefit the many companies that do business and have offices in both countries.
-- Alastair
Wow, post before you go to bed and wake up and get like 10 replies :)
Slakware is just the most secure distribution I have found, as opposed to red hat witch my friend can root in about 4-5 seconds [I've timed him before].
Although you do make some good points, I still stick by what I say, as if you have a computer secure you have to disable something you use everyday [like xfree86]
--Semi-----------------------
|semi@nix.org
|#resistance irc.otherside.com
ln -s
the machine counts only votes that are absolutely a positive vote.
Perhaps you should look at the definitions of "necessary" and "sufficient". Your claim is that it is necessary for a vote to be properly prepared for the machine to count it.
The claim made by the Gore camp is that it wasn't sufficient for a vote to be properly prepared for the machine to count it.
Even your claim is in dispute (by the by the manufacturers of the machine, no less), but that doesn't matter -- no-one provided any evidence to discard Gore's claim. Bush's lawyers didn't dispute it, and every court semed to assume it was true. The decisions always came down to other matters of law and fact.
But if you actually believe that the problem in Florida was with people who are "unable to read directions," then you've manged to shove your head very deep in the sand. Think about what actually happened some more, please.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Like it or not, NSA is an organization that really cares about tough and efficient security in computer systems. They also have alot of experts in that domain, and the fact that they make all of their modifications public is great for the open source software.
Even without taking all their modifications directly and integrating them, they might just show developpers innovative ways to secure Linux, which can lead to better security for everyone and alot of other software in which security is critical.
So in short, I think they're contributing to open source as a whole, not only to Linux. I also think their contribution is a BIG one. This sounds great!
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
Does the USsian goverment think that Canada belongs to them and therefore Canadians must have the same rights as USsian citizens?
Can the Queen of Britain work for the NSA (if she wanted to and had the required skills), she's English, but she's also head of state of Canada?
Are you kidding? Read the article? No way. I know there are subliminal algorithms contained within to make me trust the NSA. no No NO. Where's my aluminium beanie?
Ritchie's classic essay, "Reflections on Trusting Trust", is available from the ACM.
While I agree with your point completely, are you sure that your non-NSA Linux box doesn't have any gcc backdoors? Have you gone over it with a hex editor, or even gdb? Are you sure that your current system is any safer than anything the NSA may put out?
I haven't done any of that either; I'm as guilty as the next person of trusting the upstream sources. I'm just saying that I don't think that the NSA is the only party that would be susceptible to making stealthy changes to your system.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Whatever your opinion of the NSA might be, this is going to be a real boost to fighting the argument that "an open source operating system can't be secure." What I am looking forward to, though, is the incorporation of some of the NSA's code into some of the existing major Linux Distributions. Most of us would have a problem running the NSA's software right out of the box because we are so well trained to mistrust authority. Still... very cool.
Wow the government is waking up to the fact that security through obscurity is not security at all.
Plus think of all the money they save with all us crypto geeks hacking at their code testing for bugs, coming up with new additions just because it would be cool to say you helped write part of the NSA's security system
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
As we saw in the Red Hat pirahna saga, you should not assume that because something is open source, it must be secure. People assumed that because pirahna was open sourced, someone would have noticed the obvious password flaw within hours or just a few days after it was released. But NO, it took longer than that.
Do not rely only on peer review. If you want to be sure about what you are using, especially in environments needing ultimate security, do your own damn auditing and testing or pay someone to do it.
Oh, and Merry Christmas.
Blah blah BLAH blah blah!
You post the same thing every single time someone mentions *BSD. Don't you get tired of being so repetitive?
Here's a fact for you: Market share doesn't matter for anything but profitability. If a product is free and distributable, it's going to continue to be used regardless of what the companies behind it do. (including go out of business)
In short, who CARES that FreeBSD went out of business? It's still available, and it's as good now as it was before. Marketing surveys are all pretty much shite.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Oh... Because if I had to make a system secure, I'd use Linux. Today I'm going to go throw out my EFS on Win2k. Instead of using a sensible OS and securing my system with a few clicks, I'll be able to do it some really fucked up way, I'd bet. Maybe they have a cool command line feature. Yeah... .emfn -cf -or | exfss. Way to go /.!
Long live Microsoft!
This statement is opinion and is fundamentally flawed. Of course it is possible to have a completely secure and completely usable multi-user system. Where did you get the idea that a secure system is less usable than an unsecure one?
It is true that many vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis. These vulnerabilities are the result of only ONE thing: programmer error.
Eliminate programmer error and, assuming we're not introducing vendor/admin error into the equation, you have a secure system. The largest causes of programmer error are:
ignorance
carelessness
laziness
Unfortunately, even the best coders in the world are still human, and that leaves the possibility for error. The larger and more complex the project, the larger the chance for error. So what's the answer? Collaboration. Peer review. Open source is the best method for peer review.
You could also set it so you have NO ports open, but then you can't get on most irc networks because of no ident...
This is a moot point. IRC is not something you would be running on a mission-critical must-be-secure box. You must also understand that just because a box has no ports open doesn't mean it's secure.
so just stick with slak 7.1 with a chmod'd suid perl
Are you implying that slackware 7.1 is a secure system? Have you audited the entire distribution yourself? Can you honestly say that you trust your distribution to be 100% secure?
If you do, one of these days, you're going to be in for a rude awakening. Unfortunately, that's a problem with admins these days. They blindly trust their systems. I don't care if a specific OS wasn't vulnerable to ANY bugs disclosed in the last 3 years, that doesn't mean that that OS is secure. You should ALWAYS assume all systems to be insecure and untrusted.
It's not really a question of secure/insecure, because no system is completely secure; it's more a question of faith and trust.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.
Still trust the NSA?
--
--
I'm always right.
I think they are going with Linux now because windows source code (with its NSA backdoors ) is in the hands of somebody in St. Petersburg.
I'm pretty sure BSD does not.
jim
Lets say for a moment, that they do release a distro, with full source. You don't trust them. So you install their distro, then recompile everything, and your all safe and cozy. So you think. Since you just compiled the code with their compiler, you have no way of knowing if the compiler was compromised. The compiler could be set up to stuff a little bit of code into certain programs, everytime their compiled, including itself. So if you compiled a new compiler with source you downloaded from the gnu web site lets say, your new compiler would still put in those nasty bits. I recall reading a really good article about this by Dennis Richie I think....
But the basic premise of it is, if your going to install their distro, copy all the source onto another linux box (read never had their distro on it), examine it, then compile all the peices and install from your compiled versions....and if you don't, don't you DARE ever ever ever share binaries compiled on that system with anyone. Just share source..please.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
... in case The Man makes them take it down again.
I've already started to mirror the main packages themselves.
I think we need to add a few new options for the mods...
Score +1 Cautious
Score -1 Paranoid
Score -5 Written from a Y2K Bunker
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Argh - it's the return of the spelling Nazis!
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
Does anyone want to speculate why the NSA chose linux instead of OpenBSD, or some other BSD?
Actually, the only copyrights the US government is permitted to hold are those it acquires from some other entity - either donated or purchased. Work generated by US government employees as part of their duties is in the public domain.
:-)
Which raises an interesting question. In order to assert the GPL, you must have a copyright. The modifications to Linux done by US government employees must have been copyrighted by a non-government entity. Who is it? It could be the employees themselves (as individuals), or it could have been "given" (I won't say assigned, because there's nothing to assign) to someone like Linus. But anyone can claim copyright if they want.
The F117, etc. issue is a red herring. Contractor or not, classified information is protected from copying and distribution not by copyright law, but rather more stringent laws
Liam Healy
I've put a mirror up of this release as of 23/12/00 at planetmirror.com:
ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/selinux/
http://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/selinux/
cheers,
-jason
Yeah, and I used to have a CTSA/TS/SCI/CNWDI. Shall I spell it out for you?
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
There has been a lot of interest in open systems in the Russian Federation because you can legally have the source code. This isn't the old days and they are not supposed to be sitting on the VSS archives of NT.
Strangely enough, the Russian federation has a similar probem to the US. How to do electronic commerce securely. The Russian Federation is a lot bigger (9 hours time difference from St. Pete to Vladivostok) thus making non-electronic commerce a major problem.
If the Russians decide they also like SE Linux, it will be a big plus. At the moment, on the commercial side, they use a mixture of OpenBSD and Mandrake Linux.
If you want to do anything security-wise, FAPSI want to know about it so I'm pretty sure we'll get to hear their opinion soon. The general Russian opinion on standard Linux was not that high for security, although they liked the price and the uptime.
See my journal, I write things there
Actually they aren't forced to make it public, they are only forced to give the source code to who the os is distributed. They could just distribute internally and make it avaliable to anyone who uses their systems. This release is really a decision they made based on the need for security or publicity. Which one doesn't matter, what matters is they were not forced to do this.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
"Someone, possibly you, subscribed to the mailing list 'selinux' at tycho.nsa.gov. Please confirm this action if you wish to subscribe."
but the head of NORAD is a canadian officer (since russian nukes have to fly over canadia to get to us). so i don't think his being canadian is too big a deal.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
The key concept of mandatory access controls is that ordinary users are prevented from leaking information even if they want to. Discretionary access controls, all standard UNIX has, allow any user to change their own file modes to 777 and allow access by anybody.
Once you have mandatory access controls, you have to figure out new ways to do many administration tasks. Logging in as root isn't an option. Getting the Linux community thinking about how that can work is a major step forward.
If Linux system administration and applications get worked around to where they can live with mandatory security, that's a big win. Then a kernel with mandatory security can become widely used.
Of course, this is not something that just appeared out of the wild blue yonder, we all heard about this last year.
href=http://mail.nl.linux.org//securedistros/2000- 01/msg00014.html
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/13/1029206.shtm l
As for the enhancements, if I understand this correctly, think of them as providing the kernel the ability to "sandbox" any application somewhat like the java model. This limits the ability to use a root exploit of one application to gain access to the rest of the system.
Source unzipped, untarred and ready to go C-Ya!
Good thoughts, except that Apache doesn't deserve much credit, if any.
:-)
The NSA has been using 'sort of open' code since several decades before the www even existed, let alone apache. Try looking at the long view, and you'll realise that the NSA has owned more computing power than just about anyone for most of the history of computers, and the very idea of proprietary software hasn't been around for very much of that time.
Open source as a concept is as old as computing. Open Source as an evangelical movement is the only thing that's new. (and usually quite annoying
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There are certain pockets in the US govt that are working toward more incorporation of open source products, thanks (from my perspective) in a large part to Apache. (Oracle's port didn't hurt, either) Also, the govt buys hardware from the same vendors other companies buy hardware from - and you can get some delicious rackmount servers from Dell with Linux on them.
For every project that succeeds with an open source product, the door opens a little wider for more projects...and government contracting means big money. Why should micro$oft benefit? I think it would be great to see companies like VA , RedHat, Lineo, etc, to get attention from the federal sector. Maybe then the commercial sector will pay more attention.
And we could get frickin' Quicken, or Bryce, or Flash for Linux.
--mandi
Both are old, and both are known to be buggy. Sure they have a beta version for 2.2.17, but still, most production places arn't going to want to use beta stuff, or a buggy kernel.
--
Free Mac Mini
"Secure Linux"? It's called BSD.
Just think, soon you'll be hearing "Hi, I'm Bob and I run NSALinux."
Wonder when they're going to have their IPO.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
....it doesn't matter if M$ diss Linux, because we have conclusive proof that Linux is better!
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Moderator's essentials
I think you mean Silicon Valley - Silicone Valley is quite a ways further south along Hollywood Boulevard.