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Monday, June 18, 2007

Red Hat: Pretty Darn Secure

Nick has mentioned a couple of times that they use Red Hat where he is at.

I thought he may be interested to know that Red Hat received a security certification this week so high that no other mainstream operating system has it.

Some quotes:
Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5 software running on IBM servers can now be used at high level of U.S. government networks, the companies said Monday.

By receiving what is called Common Criteria certification, Red Hat’s product is certified for homeland security, command-and-control operations and throughout other government agencies.

The National Security Agency was among the agencies involved in the review process.

“With the certification, no mainstream operating system in the world offers a higher level of security certification,” IBM and Red Hat said in a joint statement.

"This is the highest level of security function that anybody has," Frye said. "We have delivered LSPP functionality in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and we have certified that at the EAL4 level of assurance."
So, the take home message: Red Hat is pretty darn secure. Even more than Windows. :)

More info here.

2 comments:

  1. As much as I like Red Hat 5, I have to say that it is still not perfect. In my research group, my computer is the first to be upgraded to Red Hat 5 (the others run Red Hat 4). This has led to an odd compatibility problem: occasionally after logging in to my account on one of the Red Hat 4 machines, when I log into my computer, I am greeted with what the IT guys have called "the black screen of death", which consists of a screen that is totally black except for the mouse, which still happily moves around.

    I guess the take home lesson is that even the most secure OS in the world can still have some pretty silly bugs in it.

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  2. Nick, this is because Red Hat is not designed very well to upgrade. (I know they will argue but this is one area reality will prove me out.)

    Debian based system's based off of the dpkg package management system using .deb format upgrade very well. (Ubuntu is Debian based.)

    Red Hat uses .rpm format with yum. It doesn't work as well.

    I don't think Red Hat cares. All their eggs go into the security/server basket. Which is the reason I don't use it. (Or an exact clone of it like Scientific Linux).

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