Multitudes of bug fixes and feedback on Red Hat Inc.'s inclusion of Security-Enhanced Linux in the Fedora Project have been submitted from the Linux community since the test2 beta was released in late March. Suffice it to say that the returns have been far more beneficial to Red Hat than any controlled beta release could hope for. . . .
Multitudes of bug fixes and feedback on Red Hat Inc.'s inclusion of Security-Enhanced Linux in the Fedora Project have been submitted from the Linux community since the test2 beta was released in late March. Suffice it to say that the returns have been far more beneficial to Red Hat than any controlled beta release could hope for.

Red Hat put SE Linux in Fedora, its openly developed and constantly changing version of Linux, in preparation for inclusion in the distributor's flagship server OS Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 due in early 2005. SE Linux, developed by the National Security Agency, is an implementation of mandatory access control (MAC) in the Linux kernel that splits root functionality into roles.

Red Hat said Friday it would incorporate the bug fixes and feedback into RHEL in order to correctly configure its policies.

RHEL 4.0 will be the first Linux distribution to include SE Linux, and that along with several impending Common Criteria certifications should open many doors in the enterprise and government for Red Hat.

"Achieving certification is important because it now enables Linux to penetrate markets where it was not able to penetrate before," said Paul Cormier, Red Hat executive vice president of engineering. "Linux has been used in the government for some time, but it can't get official contracts because it's not certified [Common Criteria]."

Red Hat's inclusion of SE Linux as part and parcel of the operating system and not as an added feature is just part of the Raleigh, N.C. company's security road map for 2004. RHEL 3.0 is currently Common Criteria EAL 2 certified. It is currently working on EAL 3 and expects EAL 4 by the time RHEL 4.0 is released next year.

The link for this article located at techtarget.com is no longer available.