Secure OS Gets Highest NSA Rating, Goes Commercial

ancientribe writes "A hardened operating system used in the B1B bomber and other military aircraft has now been released commercially, after receiving the highest security rating by a National Security Agency-run certification program. Green Hills Software's Integrity-178B operating system was certified as EAL6+, which means that it can defend against well-funded and sophisticated attackers." The company is not saying how much the OS would cost a potential customer: "The system and its associated integration and consulting services are custom solutions." Both Windows and Linux are EAL 4+ certified, which means they can defend against "inadvertent and casual" security breach attempts.

Comments

Re:n/t

[moderatorrater]

Source code audits with automated scripts that attack every port and every program checking for buffer overflows or other avenues of attack. It would require a lot of work, but it makes sense that the NSA would put in a lot of work to explore these operating systems, both to know how to secure against attack and to know how to pull off an attack against another country. The real question is, how much do you trust this OS not to have an NSA back door?

Re:n/t

[betterunixthanunix]

Actually, the security of a system should not depend on hiding the operating details of the system. The EAL levels are based on things like audit logs, privilege separation, the ability to kick a user off the system and kill all their processes, etc. The availability of the source is neither a positive nor a negative on EAL ratings.