December 23, 2000

11:09 AM

Well, we talked about NORAD a few posts back, I guess now it's time for everyone's *other* favorite agency: the NSA has a logo. That's funny. No, really, the topic of this posting is their release of Security-Enhanced Linux, including Mandatory Access Control and other cool B-1'ish stuff. Ted T'so has some interesting observations in this Slashdot thread on the topic as well.
posted by baylink (5 comments total)

A stray thought I had as I headed off down the /thread was this: what better point on the S-curve of desktop adoption of Linux could there be to harden things up a bit than now...
posted by baylink at 11:37 AM on December 23, 2000

I think the fact that they have waited this long to consider OS security speaks volumes.
posted by chiXy at 6:41 PM on December 26, 2000

Interesting... the remainder of that thought was lost in transit. Oh well. It was a valiant effort.
posted by chiXy at 6:45 PM on December 26, 2000

Who? The NSA?

You've been napping. The National Computer Security Center, the division of NSA charged with this stuff, has been on this horse for 20 or 30 *years*.
posted by baylink at 8:15 AM on December 27, 2000

Actually it was the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Secure Computing Corporation (SCC) that arrived at seLinux.

Other similar projects were the synergy research project (comments to USENIX in 94 or 95, i think) which is no longer active and Flask: flux advaced security kernel which is not an OS, but security arcitecture (implemented in selinux)

The Computer Security Center wasn't chartered until 1982. Then they started spewing forth the 'rainbow' books
posted by chiXy at 6:20 AM on December 28, 2000