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SUSE Awarded EAL4 Certification
An anonymous reader writes "Following in the wake of its previous certifications, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 has achieved EAL4 certification on 'an IBM eServer.' This puts SLES9 in the same league as Windows 2000 for sales in the government sector and is the first Linux distro to achieve an EAL4 certification."
Not likely to happen soon. Just because it's been EAL4 certified doesn't mean that is allowed to be operated on a Federal network. In the case of DoD network, it still needs a CTO (Certificate To Operate) before being allowed to be connected to the network. A CTO requires a whole DITSCAP session, formal documentation, evaluation and recommendation. For an operating system, it could literally be years before a CTO is produced. An interim CTO could be generated, but I don't think any major commands are willing to risk issuing one for such an unknown as this.
Copy/paste from the link under EAL4 :
"The evaluation levels are ordered hierarchically in increments beginning from EAL1 to EAL7, with each level requiring a more advanced and intense means of testing. To date, EAL4 is the highest level certification awarded to any security product in the market."
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There aren't any battleships currently in commission in the US Navy, all have been either scrapped or mothballed. You're probably thinking of the prototype cruiser that made all the headlines. It was running NT, bluescreened and the ship was stuck. Not that the bluescreen was not an OS error, but an error due to a divide by zero from the application, and it wasn't written well enough to handle that error nicely, so the OS did what it was supposed to. The ship was rushed anyway, and supposed to have Unix backends for all the C^2 functions. NT is just for the user workstations.
The US retired the Rainbow Series a while ago, but EAL4 is about a close approximation to C2.
Linux didn't achieve it.. a specific distribution by SUSE did. The documentation and implmenetation designs are by suse.
The certification doesn't require documenting all the code.... it's more about overall system design,the security model, user authentication, etc.
Disclaimer: I work for the IBM Linux Technology Center; any comments I make are entirely my own.
It's really a matter of money and time.
And blood, sweat, and tears. You're talking to a guy who spent countless hours drafting hundreds of pages of low-level design documentation on the Linux kernel and set of trusted userspace applications in order to help satisfy the CAPP/EAL4 requirements. True, IBM paid me to do it, but the effort is far from trivial, and Linux's reputation gets a nice bolster when things like security certification happen.
Back when my team achieved CAPP/EAL3 certification, the general attitude on Slashdot was, ``Great, but wake me up when we get EAL4.'' Well, now we've got EAL4. We have a secure protection profile ironed out, documented, and deployed, which helps immensely with setting up a locked down Linux box. We have engineers who have been given the job to review thousands of lines of source code and to write and run a battery of tests to verify that Linux kernels and applications really do, from a security standpoint, just what they claim to do, and they do it right. But I think, more than anything, that this is a strong indication of Linux's maturity. For the public sector, this satisfies a core requirement of many contracts. For the private sector, this is one more thing to impress the boss when advocating Linux solutions.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
But Novell/SuSE also deserves credit for running a top-notch configuration management system (Autobuild), having controls and procedures for keeping track of where which patches that get incorporated come from, and for having a patch notification and publication process that enables customers to get timely notification of necessary patches.
The business processes surrounding manufacturing the distribution and supporting customers on a global basis are valuable Novell/SuSE contributions.
Disclaimer: I work for Novell and work with the folks at SuSE on a daily basis.