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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."
.......oh fuck!
It's really a matter of money and time.
While some of these certifications seem silly and almost obvious (as in "well of COURSE it can do that").
We should remember, for non-technical people (i.e.: most of the government) this is all they have to judge tehcnical suitability for the job. And like the beauracrats they are, they adhere pretty strictly to these things.
So yes, it is a big deal that a major distro's broken through some of the red tape.
Wow, I guess Mr. Gates and company must be biting their nails. 2000 has that certification yet XP, the best product with "advanced security technologies" has nothing.
Well I guess it means times have changed. Linux is a big player in the game now and Microsoft needs to realize this and stop denying. False statements hurt worse than the bitter truth of "your product isn't good enough". I rather trust a company and have something that works okay and secure than some company that hides facts and has a better product in some ways, just not security.
It is funny how someone came out with a report saying windows is more secure, but is that based off the experimental code or source and which distribution. Novell and SuSE have always taken security as a priority and it shows.
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.
CC evaluation is not an automatic thing. The sponsoring company (in that case Microsoft) pays for the evaluation. A target is generated, which details hardware and software configurations. This can take months. Then the actual platform itself is evaluated, which can also take months, especially if deficiencies are found and corrected. Win2k was released in 2000, but didn't get CC evaluation until 2004. There's a hint.
Re: XP's non-cert status...
People tend to like things that are tried and true and are known to run solid.. Or with small incremental changes, done carefully.
The problem with XP is two-fold.. first.. it (the "jump" to XP) was just that, a jump, that wasnt all that carefully considered beforehand (MS just figured that most people would go with it, because after all, it IS the latest and greatest).
Second, MS marketing actually shot them in the foot here. They marketed this as the "hot new thing", "new and improved", "great new features", etc. Now, while this technique tends to work well on the general american public... it does not fly well with the government, who would much perfer "increased stability" concurrent with "improved performance". That is, they want exactly what they have but better. They dont really want the architecture that they understand pulled out from under them and replaced with a whiz-bang new thing, because, from experience, they know that sort of replacement tends to lead to troubles in critical situations.
And on the whole, they're right.. if you must must must have a system that works, it's much better not to induldge in new and potentially useless features at the expense of a solid system.
I think the MS has improved on that with 2k, etc. , but I'm not sure.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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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This really only makes a difference in the federal sector here in the U.S., as commercial firms might be interested in CC, they understand that CC really doesn't mean a whole lot. For the federal sector, this is only one half of the whole ball of wax.
Just about every DoD or other federal government RFP these days requires that every part of the solution be CC EAL 3 or greater because of DoDD 8200.1 and other mandates. Without CC, you can't be considered, no matter how much better your solution is than the relatively limited menu of certified options.
The other half is FIPS 140-2, which covers data encryption. If you don't have FIPS 140-2 you can't play ball, and even then in some places like the U.S. Navy, there's another layer of certifications for NMCI and such. So however we might celebrate SLES EAL4 cert, it STILL doesn't get them in the game without adding on a (typically) expensive FIPS 140-2 certified SSL component. My understanding is that RedHat understood this and bundled a certified solution with RHEL.
So will this announcement cause more enterprises to use SLES? Nope. They don't really care. Companies? Same boat. Governments? Only in those cases where SLES will exist entirely within a secure intranet or will piggyback on a generally closed-source 3rd party FIPS certified encryption system. SLES hasn't scored yet.
The other barrier is that for most potential government installs, there has to be CC certified software to run on it, unless it's just a network appliance. MySQL, Apache and all the rest would have to be CC certified to actually get a pure open source solution in the door.
The net effect is that this plays directly into the hands of the big software/hardware vendors and creates a barrier to entry for smaller players who would like to play in the federal space. Sure, SLES is certified, but with what? Oracle and IBM? Who's going to pay to get Apache2 certified for both Common Criteria and FIPS 140-2?? Or MySQL? Or PHP4? Look for more domination in the federal software market by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, who will have even less incentive to create really good software because this somewhat meaningless certification process reduces competition and increases profitability for those who can invest in certifications.
Look at NMCI if you are doubtful. It hasn't helped the Navy improve it's IT infrastructure one bit, and made EDS nearly the sole vendor for all IT for the Navy. It's the gatekeeper of the NTISSP certification process, and everything it decides to approve has to be purchased through and managed by EDS. Certifications like this are simple money grabs by major Systems Integrators and muscular software companies.
Nothing to see here. Keep moving.
The EPL (Enterprise Product List) only lists software that is allowed to run on a Federal network. As long as the system isn't connected to a Federal network and meets the requirements of the contract in terms of reliability, security and auditability, there is nothing to say that a contractor couldn't use SuSE or even RHES (was evaluated EAL3) unless it was expressly forbidden in the contract.
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.
That, my friend, is probably the most succinct description of what is wrong with the world of personal computing that I've heard yet.
The only thing I would add is that this applies all across the board. Home users and corporate office users are in the same boat: they often have no interesting in "upgrading" to get more whiz-bang because they don't need it and don't want the headaches. That's the essentially conservative attitude that the bulk of users have, because any significant change means they may have to spend time and money they don't have to learn something new, deal with problems that weren't there before, and may find their shiny new OS and apps interfering with getting their jobs done. Microsoft's feature-oriented marketing and forced upgrade cycles have probably caused more lost man-hours than the common cold.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The French Ministry of Defense will put up 7 million over the next three years to fund an industrial consortium building a Linux-based operating system that can achieve EAL5 certification. The coalition includes Bertin Technologies, SURLOG, Jaluna, Mandrakesoft, and OPPIDA.
BTW. There are Server and Embedded Linux version that has achieved Telecom Carrier Grade certification for reliablity. Microsoft won't try to get Telecom Carrier Grade certification for Windows because it is too unreliable.
"There is no point comparing security of win2k and linux based on that cert... "
Here's the obvious point: If you are trying to SELL it it matters. Discussing it on slashdot and what it really means or does is one thing, getting some org or agency or corporation to drop x-millions of dollars in your lap for your product is another. One of the main complaints about Linux that you read over and over is "how do you make money with open source software"? Well, here's one way to make that a reality. Jump through the hoops they set up for consideration. No jumping, no consideration. Emphasizing skins and themes and whether or not you can play some video game and such like noise is cute,and seemingly a major part of most distros out there, but if you want to be taken seriously where the big dogs play with their checkbooks, you got to toe some of the lines they have drawn in the sand.
An evaluation process, that, if completed successfully, allows (mainly) government IT users to justify their usage of SLES for some roles more easily to auditors, and makes its use possible in others.
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.
It's really a _lot_ of paperwork and I'm sure that MS got that cert everywhere it really matters. As for linux, seeing distros get that cert means that they have certain hopes to see linux in some places that require EAL4. Nothing more.
"I'm sure Gates would have like to have been able to say , "Hey, XP's EAL4 certified by the US government" when asked about MS's commitment to security and stability recently."
I'm sure Bill can say better and lower priced nonsense than that.