Novell Acquires SELinux Alternative Immunix

G Money writes "Novell announced today that they acquired Immunix, a company the produces an alternative mandatory access control solution to SELinux using the LSM. For anyone who hasn't used both Immunix and SELinux, the difference between configuring them is like night and day. There's even a YaST module for configuration. (Disclaimer: I'm on the Defcon Immunix CTF team.)"

Comments

Good Thing?

[hbo]

And that is a Good Thing.

A good thing is where your life becomes sweeter, funnier, easier or more pleasant in some way. Having two approaches to MAC pushed by the two leading Linux vendors makes my life (or the part I spend as a sysadmin) harder fer cryin' out loud!

What is it with Unix-like operating systems and non-primitive access control? Every Unix flavor adopted different approaches to "Red Book" security in the 1980s on top of the barely-adequate-for-academic-use Unix permissions model. Those that survived have never standardized in all those years. I really hate to see Red Hat and SuSE continue on that well-worn path. And before you say Open Source is different in this regard, take a look at the competing desktops. It's roughly 10 years that both major projects have been pursuing seperate paths. And freedesktop.org proves the point. They are expending an awful lot of effort to bridge the gap those competing projects dug between themselves.

Competing approaches are fine for research into the best way to get things done. They are also a spur to development of different approaches. But MAC is not new computer science that needs researching. And choice is often actually the enemy in a production business computing environment.

Bah!