News
NSA Teams Up with Sun on OpenSolaris Security
Agency plans to transfer technology improvements to private sector
Sun Microsystems and the National Security Agency announced this week that they are working together to develop new security tools for the OpenSolaris operating system.
The project, which will be developed through the OpenSolaris community, will focus on integrating mandatory access control (MAC) via Flux Advanced Security Kernel (Flask) architecture and Type Enforcement. It's a task that NSA researchers have already been working on, according to the release.
"NSA is pleased that the work of its research organization in the area of secure computing is being used as a foundation for secure solutions by industry," said Dick Schaeffer, chief of NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, in a press release announcing the project. "We are committed to promoting transfer of those technologies to the private sector to improve the assurance of commercial products that are becoming more critical to the future of the U.S. Government infrastructure."
"The combination of the NSA's expertise and Sun's 18 years of experience in delivering mandatory access control solutions, along with its commitment to the open standards community, provides the basis for investigating the use of the Flask functionality with the OpenSolaris operating system," commented Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz in the same release. "This is an opportunity to improve the security of an already robust OpenSolaris environment in a manner that may benefit government and commercial customers alike."
More information on this OpenSolaris project can be found here.
About the Author
Becky Nagel is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Converge360 Group, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital projects at the company, including launching and running the group's popular virtual summit and Coffee talk series . She an experienced tech journalist (20 years), and before her current position, was the editorial director of the group's sites. A few years ago she gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web browser technology would impact online advertising for publishers. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.