Trusted Operating Systems: A Higher Security Standard For FreeBSD

While most Freenix admins are used to the normal concerns of Unix security, there is a higher world of security that has never been touched by Freenixes. The realm of trusted operating systems, long the province only of military and other ultra-secure environments, represents a security level beyond that of all but a few commercial operating systems. . . . While most Freenix admins are used to the normal concerns of Unix security, there is a higher world of security that has never been touched by Freenixes. The realm of trusted operating systems, long the province only of military and other ultra-secure environments, represents a security level beyond that of all but a few commercial operating systems.

Trusted operating systems are not precisely defined, but generally include a number of security enhancements not usually found in Unix. Access control lists (ACLs) allow a file or directorys permissions to be more fine-grained than just owner, group, all. Rather than having just a single root user, limited administration capability can be broken up among a number of administrative accounts ensuring that even an administrator account compromise is non-fatal.

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