Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat is working with IBM Corp and Trusted Computer Solutions Inc, a provider of secure information sharing technologies to the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community, to meet the EAL4 requirements required for government agency information sharing.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is not due for general release until late 2006 but is being evaluated on the range of IBM server brands and against the Common Criteria Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP), Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) and Role-Based Controlled Access Protection Profile (RBAC).
Novell Inc’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 was certified with EAL4 on IBM servers in March, but only with the Controlled Access Protection Profile, and Red Hat maintained that Enterprise Linux 5 will be the first open source operating system with the range of security capabilities.
In September 2004 Trusted Computer Solutions announced plans to target Common Criteria EAL4 certification with Trusted Linux, based on the National Security Agency’s Security Enhanced Linux project. The same SELinux capabilities are already in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and are being enhanced by Red Hat, IBM, and TCS for RHEL 5.
