Just as with toddlers in playgroup, when one child starts to scream, the rest are almost certain to join the chorus – Sun Microsystems Inc’s new offspring are all beginning to clamour for attention at once. Now the Sun Microsystems Federal unit has introduced a secure offering, the SunOS Compartmented Mode Workstation operating system, claiming that it’s the first secure implementation of distributed computing Unix operating system environment to be evaluated by the US government. SunOS Compartmented Mode Workstation is targeted at government, intelligence, military and commercial Sparc system users. SunOS Compartmented Mode Workstation includes the Open Network Computing environment, Open Windows, Open Look, and DeskSet, the suite of applications which encompasses a secure mailtool, diary manager and file manager. The thing is now undergoing evaluation by the US National Computer Security Center and Defense Intelligence Agency for B1 Orange Book and Compartmented Mode Workstation compliance. Production shipments will start in the second quarter of next year – at $3,000 per licence – and recipients will include customers of the Air Force Computer Acquisition Center 308 contract that Sun won earlier this year, as well as some classified contracts it holds. Sun has Addamax Inc doing documentation consulting and has licensed SecureWare Inc’s Max Six label conventions to make its stuff more interoperable.brought its trusted Unix System V.4-based Compartmented Mode Workstation technology up to the newest spec, Compartmented Mode Workstation Evaluation Criteria, Version 1, published recently by the US Defense Intelligence Agency. It is the first such product in the formal government evaluation queue, a process set to start on this iteration in December and finish next summer. The new requirements incorporate 27 major changes and a host of minor ones, all aimed at making second-generation Compartmented Mode Workstations more usable in the real world. Addamax is converting its technology, now on 80386, to RISC systems such as the 80860, 88000 and Sparc with availability slated for December.
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