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

Let the Testing begin...

[sbenson]

Now let people who don't have financial ties test it.

Re:Let the Testing begin...

[Verdatum]

The financial ties involved in EAL evalution are pretty loose at best. I'm more familiar with FIPS and Orange Book evaluation, but assuming the processes are similar, evaluation is done a an independent third party organization; usually as a result of a requirement stated in a government contract. There is not much in the way of monetary incentive for the evaluation group to rate a product any higher than it deserves to be.

That being said, I don't believe EAL6+ requires any additional vulnerability testing beyond that of than EAL5+; it is mostly just a stricter evaluation/review of the soundness of the OS design.

Re:Let the Testing begin...

[sbenson]

If it is Internet facing, it's an open test bed.

Re:Let the Testing begin...

[Isao]

Ok, here are some real facts about how this works.

Under the Common Criteria (CC), people with financial ties create the product. They (or another sponsor who wants the product evaluated) pay an independent lab (CCTL) to evaluate it. Labs are certified by NIAP, a partnership of NIST and the NSA Information Assurance directorate. (The NSA has two main parts, the other is Signals Intelligence.) The independent lab evaluation is overseen by a Validation team employed by the government, who reviews the process and results of every evaluation, including all vendor evidence, before it is certified. The Validators also oversee the labs for proper execution of the CC. Once it passes all these reviews successfully it is certified.

Certifications are tiered by Evaluation Assurance Levels (EALs), from 1 to 7. Generally, the higher the EAL, the greater confidence there is in the vendor claims. This is NOT the same as being more secure!

The way to use these certified products is to select a product family (say firewalls), and review at a minimum two documents: The Security Target (ST) and Validation Report (VR). The ST is written by the vendor or sponsor, and basically contains the security claims they're making for the product, and how they expect the product to be used. The Validation Report describes how those claims were evaluated, and what notable things the Validation team observed during the evaluation. After reading both of these documents (usually not more than 100 pages - pretty short for 1-2 years of work) you can determine if the product can be used in its certified configuration in your environment.

Check out some interesting operating systems, like Windows XP, Mac OS X, or one of the Linux's.

It's certainly not perfect, but it's better than what we had.

n/t

[KasperMeerts]

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.

Re:n/t

[characterZer0]

EAL does not mean what you think it does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_Assurance_Level

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

[blhack]

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.

You forget the the NSA pretty much recruits the best and brightest hackers that the world has to offer. Their policy of "we don't have a budget" and the oppurtunity to work on the absolute cutting edge (and actually see it put to use) is pretty much the most kickass thing that you can offer somebody who has a passion for knowledge.

Re:n/t

[thermian]

I imagine they see having the source code available as a negative for Linux simply because it gives would be attackers much more information about the system than is otherwise available.

That theory is one touted by commercial OS vendors, and its been thoroughly disproved. Availability or otherwise of source code has no effect on the hardness of your OS. If anything having it available is even safer, because its a heck of a lot easier for people to point at a problem bit of code and say 'fix that bit now'.

What causes the problem is non rigorous OS design. Hiding the source won't help you protect your clients from a design flaw which allows them to be attacked.

The OS in question here however is most likely quite rigorously designed, and won't have a lot of the bloat that causes desktop OSs so many problems.

Re:n/t

[CaptainPatent]

Indeed, I was looking at that too and some interesting points from the wiki article:

To achieve a particular EAL, the computer system must meet specific assurance requirements. Most of these requirements involve design documentation, design analysis, functional testing, or penetration testing. The higher EALs involve more detailed documentation, analysis, and testing than the lower ones. Achieving a higher EAL certification generally costs more money and takes more time than achieving a lower one. The EAL number assigned to a certified system indicates that the system completed all requirements for that level.
[...]
Technically speaking, a higher EAL means nothing more, or less, than that the evaluation completed a more stringent set of quality assurance requirements. It is often assumed that a system that achieves a higher EAL will provide its security features more reliably (and the required third-party analysis and testing performed by security experts is reasonable evidence in this direction), but there is little or no published evidence to support that assumption.

So basically it costs money to get EAL verified, and the farther up the scale you go, the more money it costs to run the testing. So even if a Linux distro wanted to be verified at a higher level - who's going to fork over the dough?

Additionally this seems to be a hired method of testing and bug report/fixing. Just because they fix the bugs found at one "level" of testing does not mean there aren't missed holes. Additionally it doesn't mean that a well written piece of software isn't capable of a higher rating with little or no fixes (like the Linux kernel probably is.) It is impressive that Integrity-178B achieved the EAL-6+ rating because it has definitely been put through its paces... and due to the way it was designed it probably has very few holes in it, but EAL should definitely not be the end-all be-all judge of OS quality.

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.

Re:n/t

[the_other_chewey]

So basically it costs money to get EAL verified, and the farther up the scale you go, the more money it costs to run the testing.

Is Scientology somehow involved in this?

Re:n/t

[lanterndog]

Yeah... I majored in pure math (e.g. abstract, theoretical stuff) in college. I was good. The NSA was all over me. I didn't accept, obviously (I wouldn't be able to admit this if I had. :) They recruit lots and lots of math people. Very few CS people (I double-majored in math and CS. Google and MS tried to recruit me through CS). However, I will get flamed to the end of the earth for this, but it's my experience: Mathematicians are insanely more intelligent than CSers. That, and cryptography (which is why the NSA exists) has much more to do with mathematics (Algebra and Number Theory especially) than it does with programming or OS design.

Re:n/t

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't I feel stoopid.

Especially so after you forgot to check 'Post Anonymously' the second time around...

Re:n/t

[Anonymous Coward]

You apparently did not read the wikipedia article through. The reason that Windows and Linux (distributions) achieve EAL-4 rating is because "EAL4 is the highest level at which it is likely to be economically feasible to retrofit to an existing product line."

Furthermore, "Commercial operating systems that provide conventional, user-based security features are typically evaluated at EAL4."

Higher levels require some sort of formal methods use in the design and testing. This is very unlikely to ever happen for Linux (it is virtually impossible to create a formal design retroactively; either it does not correspond to the system or it is just as complex as the system).

For this reason, Linux will probably never get any higher. Windows may just get higher, because it has a completely new security model and kernel, which are likely able to get EAL-6 grading in time.

Re:n/t

[orclevegam]

Cryptography yes, security no. Although cryptography is a very important tool in designing a secure OS, it's not the only one, and probably not even the most important one. Likewise for software in general. Cryptography is important for communications, and data protection which makes it important for communications between programs, and storage of programs, but actually ensuring the integrity of the system or application has a lot more to do with CS than it does Math. Both math and CS students can be equally smart, but in different ways. The math students will tend to be good at number crunching and abstract thinking, particularly in regard to projecting problems into various spaces where they can be solved using various functions. The CS students are going to tend towards a more systematic view of things in which they break problems down into sub-components without losing track of the larger picture and the way the various pieces interlock and interact with each other. You most likely perceive the math students as being "more intelligent" because you yourself are more inclined to the mathematical way of thinking about things.

When the NSA was first created the primary concern with regards to security was a combination of mathematical and physical problems. Mathematics in the form of encrypted communications, and physical in the form of ensuring that the people and/or documents that contained sensitive information and the devices used to cypher them were properly secured. With the rise of the internet and the switch to an increasingly interconnected infrastructure software security has emerged as a factor now. It no longer matters how good the encryption is between your two programs if the OS their running on can be compromised and the data scraped as the application decodes it (or better yet the encryption key itself). As such even though the NSA started as an organization specializing in primarily cryptographic systems it must expand to include software and hardware security as well.

Re:n/t

[Kjella]

So basically it costs money to get EAL verified, and the farther up the scale you go, the more money it costs to run the testing.

Uh, yes? The more specific the documentation, the more work has to be done to verify it. I'm not sure how many million LOCs are in the Linux kernel but if I had to go through EAL6+ semi-formal proofs for all of them I'd charge a bundle too. Are you really trying to imply that NSA issue this sham certification because they're short on funding? Stop trying to pretend that all the "experimental support" that goes into Linux could or should pass certification, because it damn well shouldn't. Certainly not on based on a casual "it's probably capable" that's quite frankly pulled out of your nethers with no documentation to back it up. Here for example are THREE security exploits in the kernel in the last two months:

1 Linux Kernel VDSO Unspecified Privilege Escalation Vulnerability (Vulnerabilities) Rank: 820
Last modified on: 2008-11-04 00:00:00 MST
URL: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/32099
2 Linux Kernel LDT Selector Local Privilege Escalation and Denial of Service Vulnerability (Vulnerabilities) Rank: 820
Last modified on: 2008-10-03 00:00:00 MDT
URL: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/31565
3 Linux Kernel 'generic_file_splice_write()' Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability (Vulnerabilities) Rank: 820
Last modified on: 2008-10-03 00:00:00 MDT
URL: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/31567

Don't get me wrong, Linux is a great system and all but I wouldn't want to nuclear launch control on it, sorry.

Two steps from the highest, actually

[moderatorrater]

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.

Re:Two steps from the highest, actually

[jbeaupre]

EAL9+ means it autonomously retaliates against the attacker's system.
EAL10+ means it autonomously retaliates against the attacker.

Re:Two steps from the highest, actually

[Anarke_Incarnate]

EAL11+ means it goes to eleven. The others they go to 10, but this one goes to 11, so if you need that extra.....push off the cliff....

lols

[negRo_slim]

A hardened operating system used in the B1B bomber and other military aircraft has now been released commercially

B1 Accidents, OS Homepage, More Wikipedia!

Re:lols

[db32]

I blame all of my hardware problems on software too...

Seriously, going through that list I see. Fire, lots of fires. Two instances of computer failure due to faulty hardware. A few landing gear hardware problems. A dash of pilot error or otherwise bad luck. And a rather unfortunate bird strike on a weak section of a wing (that was later redesigned because of this event IIRC).

I am curious as to what you are trying to insinuate by linking to crashes due to these issues next to the software....

Worse than Dell with the Windows tax

[Anonymous Coward]

When you order a B1B, you pay for the Integrity-178B license even if you later install a copy of Linux For Strategic Bombers.

lower that 4+

[internerdj]

Inadvertant and Casual attempts?
Oops. I tripped over my computer and hacked your system. Sorry.

"Linux" is not certified for anything

[crush]

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.

Article misleads about EAL6

[epdp14]

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

You don't know how your walls can be breached

[wintermute42]

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.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[CorporateSuit]

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.

example use

[hey]

ssh my-b1b
login: root
password: hellosss
last login Tue Nov 18 17:22:14 EST 2008 from nsa
# drop -4 bombs
# exit

EAL = ToE(DUT) + ST(environment)

[conspirator57]

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.