"An operating system used in military fighter
planes has raised the bar for system security as a new commercial
offering, after receiving the highest security rating by a National
Security Agency (NSA)-run certification program.
Green Hills Software announced that its Integrity-178B
operating system was certified as EAL6+ and that the company had spun
off a subsidiary to market the OS to the private sector as well as
government agencies. "[EAL6+] is the highest [rating] in the world.
This means that the OS was designed and certified to defend against
well-funded and sophisticated attackers," says David Chandler, CEO of Integrity Global Security LLC, the new Green Hills subsidiary.
Windows and Linux, meanwhile, are EAL 4+ certified, which means they
can defend against "inadvertent and casual" security breach attempts,
Chandler says. Integrity-178 B meets the rigorous Common Criteria
Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP) standard, which guarantees
that malicious code can’t corrupt or harm any other application running
on the system.
"I’m delighted that they have accomplished this," said Stephen
Hanna, a co-chair of the Trusted Computing group and distinguished
engineer with Juniper Networks, during his keynote at the CSI 2008
conference in National Harbor, Md., today. "This is serious security."
The OS, which was first deployed in the B1B bomber in 1997,
today runs in military and commercial aircraft, including the F-16,
F-22, and F-25 military jets, and the Airbus 380 and Boeing 787
airplanes. "It was developed for the highest level of security and
reliability," Chandler says. "It’s designed to provide a separation, so
that what’s happening in one area of the computer will not hurt the
other part of the OS.""
Read more: http://www.darkreading.com/security/app-security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212100421
