Navy Now Mandated To Consider FOSS As an Option

lisah writes "In a memorandum handed down from Department of the Navy CIO John Carey this week, the Navy is now mandated to consider open source solutions when making new software acquisitions. According John Weathersby, executive director of the Open Source Software Institute, this is the first in a series of documents that will also address 'development and distribution issues regarding open source within Navy IT environments.'"

Comments

Re:Great! This is what you have to do

[jd]

There are only a handful of OS' that are considered "trusted". HP-UX BLS, Trusted Unicos 8.0, SEVMS, CS/SX, Trusted IRIX, Trusted Solaris, VSLAN, Trusted XENIX, XTS-300, XTS-400, PR/SM, SACDIN, THETA and Genesis. I see a distinct lack of OS/X, Microsoft isn't even remotely close, Linux has 30% of the RBAC requirements to be really secure in a modern environment - which is better than many, and OpenBSD is only considered watertight from external attacks - it has minimal security between users.

When you consider that you can build role-based access controls that can migrate with applications across clusters, when network connection types, network bandwidth, shared memory and inter-process communication have mandatory access controls, you really begin to see just how pathetically limited generally-available OS' really are. There's no reason for it - there's nothing that prevents a widely-available system from being harder than a diamond-encrusted pulsar.

The reason that nobody bothers much with making OS' secure is that the DoD has long-proved (by buying Windows and by failing their security audits) that security doesn't matter enough to be worth the effort. Security to this level costs big money, and only the really big corporations can afford the costs or have the market to pay for it. Companies can lose hundreds of thousands of credit cards and maybe get rapped knuckles - if they're even discovered. Only one State requires reporting - but plenty of other places have e-Commerce. System crackers - black hats especially - are a pervasive part of society with no serious effort to secure networks against them.

If the money did exist, if there was serious interest in serious prevention, host intrusion detection wouldn't be MD5 checksums (which were beaten soundly, according to the Internet Auditing Project). Plain-text passwords wouldn't exist. One-time pads and public-key encryption would be the only way to log onto Slashdot or any other web service. Zombies, Trojans and Viruses would be found in technology museums, under "extinct electronic lifeforms". If a disk drive with tens of millions of credit cards or social security numbers went missing, in a secure world that would be cause for a few minutes downtime to replace what was lost, rather than a few weeks or months of running round in circles doing nothing.

You see any of that happening? No? Then security is still regarded as an optional extra, not as a fundamental design requirement, and will never reach its true potential. Furthermore, agencies will continue buying/copying OS' based on ease of initial deployment and not on whether it'll protect the data sufficiently.