Enhancing Trust In OS: Protecting Sensitive Data Management

Trusted operating systems have been used for some time to lock down the most sensitive of information in the most sensitive of organizations. But with security concerns rising and changing by the hour, it's now a matter of trust for any organization looking to tighten its computing ship. Several vendors, including Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and Novell, are responding by adding and/or improving trusted elements in their operating system offerings.

Operating systems are designed to do what they're told, and we tell them what to do by running applications. However, whether through bugs or malicious exploits, applications can tell an operating system to do things that no one intended or wanted it to do—at least no one authorized to do so. Today's mainstream operating systems are trusting—they trust that the applications running on them are doing what users intend the apps to be doing. These operating systems haven't been designed to limit applications from doing more than they're intended to do. This can be bad enough when you're talking about individual users, whose privileges can be limited enough to ensure that they can't modify system files.

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