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.
Now let people who don't have financial ties test it.
I'm sorry if I take a test that gives Windows and Linux the same security rating not very seriously.
Also, how can they test this? The only way to properly test something like this is to let it out in the wild for a decade or two. That's not something you can imitate in a testing room.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
EAL7+ means that it can defend against well-funded and sophisticated attacks and doesn't have an NSA backdoor built into it. EAL8 is exactly like EAL7+, only it can do it while getting slashdotted.
A hardened operating system used in the B1B bomber and other military aircraft has now been released commercially
B1 Accidents, OS Homepage, More Wikipedia!
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
When you order a B1B, you pay for the Integrity-178B license even if you later install a copy of Linux For Strategic Bombers.
Inadvertant and Casual attempts?
Oops. I tripped over my computer and hacked your system. Sorry.
It seems like in the OS battle between security and convenience, convenience wins every time. I see Windows everywhere - at the bank, on hospital equipment and at doctors' offices, on ATMs... not to rant specifically against Windows; but it shows up a lot of places where I think we'd be much better served if the company had gone to the time and expense of developing a custom solution. Really, why should Windows be running on an X-Ray machine or an electrical power plant console?
#DeleteChrome
A couple of specific distros on specific hardware have received EAL4+ certification: RHEL5 (on 12 or so different platforms) and SLES9 on IBM eServer spring to mind. I'm fairly sure that no other GNU/Linux distributions have received such certification and it makes absolutely no sense to talk about "Linux" being certified for anything.
This is not just nit-picking about GNU/Linux vs Linux as the name: it's a case where it's actually very important to be aware that specific versions of specific programs with specific configuration files have been tested and found not to fail in particular ways.
The Protection Profile and Validation Report can be downloaded at http://www.niap-ccevs.org/cc-scheme/pp/id/pp_skpp_hr_v1.03.
The Security Target and Validation Report can be downloaded at http://www.niap-ccevs.org/cc-scheme/st/vid10119/.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Is this really a true statement? According to Wikipedia, only Windows 2000, SP3 is EAL4 certified. Since this is an obsolete and unsupported release (Win2k SP4 is still supported), is it correct to say that "Windows..[is] EAL 4+ certified"?
It would be more accurate to say either: "Windows 2000, SP3 is EAL4 certified" or "Windows used to be EAL4 certified".
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
EAL6 is NOT the highest rating given by the NSA. EAL7 is. EAL7 has been awarded to one product (The Tenix Interactive Link Data Diode Device). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_Assurance_Level
The nature of computer system penetration (hacking) is that it takes a great deal of time and patience. The attacker will put a lot of effort into learning everything they can about the system and then more time in probing possible vulnerabilities.
Linux and Unix systems in general have a better underlying security model than Windows (e.g., the way root/administrator vs. user is handled). Unix architectures also had years of students attacking them (back before this was a serious crime). However, if those of us who are Linux fans are honest we know that the reason we don't have to worry as much about Linux attacks is that hackers target Windows because it is more pervasive.
The Greenhills operating system has never been exposed to a large group of people who are willing to spend a lot of time penetrating it. The idea that you can just label a system as secure seems questionable. You always get attacked via means that you didn't expect. What they're really saying is that the system implements a security model that they believe to be secure. But B1 bombers are not placed on the Internet protecting large amounts of money, so they are unlikely to attract hackers.
As much faith as I have in the NSA's security abilities, does anyone have any idea what criteria they were using exactly? Any in-depth results they've made public, preferably?
It's an aggregate result of how many social security numbers B1 bombers have lost over the last 10 years divided by how many B1 bombers, with the software installed, have been stolen out of government offices or left behind in taxi cabs.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
ssh my-b1b
login: root
password: hellosss
last login Tue Nov 18 17:22:14 EST 2008 from nsa
# drop -4 bombs
# exit
Lynx OS is EAL 7, and has been for a while. It will be quite some time before Greenhill makes it to EAL7. In the mean time, Lynuxworks uses Linux API, so that you have your choice of a real linux solution, or if needed, you can switch up to LynuxOS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The EAL is only half of the equation. The Target of Evaluation (device under test) is subjected to EAL appropriate documentation and verification against a design document called the Security Target. This ST specifies the threat environment. For example the windows ST specifies that all authorized system users are benign and thus not a threat.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Reading the comments in here, I think most of the posters don't understand what EAL 5+ is all about. Neither Linux nor Windows will ever achieve more than EAL 4. No, SELinux won't cut it. Neither will OpenBSD. 5+ requires formal verification. Do you understand what that means? You aren't testing everything you can think of, knowing that there will always be more problems because you can't think of everything and even if you could, you can't test everything. Instead, you have restricted the operations to such a small set that it actually is possible to prove every single possible permutation of all the operations will traverse and end only in known, secure states. For formal verification to be possible requires a small enough kernel, and Windows, Linux, and the BSDs are all far too large. They will never make EAL 5+. Hence the interest in microkernels.
Now, there are some idiots who think they can get a system rubberstamped if only they bribe, pressure, wear down, or befuddle enough labs. (They're also idiots for thinking that the labs can be befuddled.) I should know, I was once stuck having to work with such. Considering the depths of chicanery to which those former acquaintances were willing to go, I am not 100% confident that a system that is given a high EAL rating actually deserves the rating.
Green Hills has been hammering away at this for years, and now they've finally gotten their rating. It would greatly help with users' trust of the system if their code was open source. And it'd also help if there weren't more idiots trotting out the tired, old, and very wrong "security through obscurity" line that opening the source would compromise security. That sort of claim can only detract from any confidence that their product really is deserving of EAL 6, and that the people responsible for the evaluation know what they're doing.
Another big problem, and maybe why they didn't make EAL 7, is the hardware. I have heard that in the past systems have been considered all of a piece-- can't put the software on any old hardware, has to be only on the exact hardware it was evaluated for. But it takes so many years to get there that the hardware becomes obsolete and useless long before they're done. That's one of the things that happened with GEMSOS (could you mean GEMSOS, not Genesis?)-- it's only certified on a 286 or some such.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"