Research project enhances existing OpenSolaris security functionality

Sun Microsystems and the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) announced an agreement to jointly work within the OpenSolaris community to research and to develop security enhancements to complement existing OpenSolaris security mechanisms. Both Sun and the NSA will work with the OpenSolaris community to integrate an additional form of mandatory access control (MAC), based on the Flux Advanced Security Kernel (Flask) architecture.

The National Security Agency is recognized as one of the most respected authorities in the field of information technology security
The joint research project is intended to complement the security benefits of the mandatory access controls provided by the Solaris Trusted Extensions feature and will be evaluated by the OpenSolaris community.

The Flask architecture supports a wide range of security policies, enabling the integration of different policy engines and the configuration of the security policy to meet the specific security goals for a wide range of computing environments.

Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun Microsystems said:

The National Security Agency is recognized as one of the most respected authorities in the field of information technology security. The combination of the NSA’s expertise and Sun’s 18 years of experience in delivering mandatory access control solutions, along with its commitment to the open standards community, provides the basis for investigating the use of the Flask functionality with the OpenSolaris operating system. This is an opportunity to improve the security of an already robust OpenSolaris environment in a manner that may benefit government and commercial customers alike.