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New Security-Enhanced Linux Release 179

Posted by timothy from the tightening-up dept.
James Cho writes: "Four days ago, the 2nd public release of the NSA's 'security-enhanced' version of Linux (it's not an entire distribution) came out. The NSA describes it as having 'a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture incorporated into the major subsystems of the kernel". However it must be noted that this 'is not intended as a complete security solution for Linux' and that there is 'still much work needed to develop a complete security solution'."
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New Security-Enhanced Linux Release More

New Security-Enhanced Linux Release

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  • Nice to see NSA contributing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lightray ( 215185 ) <tobin@splorg.org> on Monday October 01, 2001 @03:58AM (#2372734) Homepage
    I have to say, it really is nice to see the NSA contributing to an open source project in such a positive manner. Being "open" isn't exactly one of their usual activities. From the changelog it looks like they are really digging into the depths of the kernel too -- not just superficial changes. Is anyone running this in a production environment?
    • I have to say, it really is nice to see the NSA contributing to an open source project in such a positive manner.
      The NSA (or its director) is claiming copyright for quite a few lines in the Linux kernel (IIRC Don Becker's network drivers are under NSA copyright). This is hardly something new.
    • Yeah, much kudos to the NSA becoming good netizens! A good PR move, methinks, especially now they're trying to get those naughty hackerz onside...

      I steal your .sigs
    • I don't think the NSA is particularly interested in "contributing" to anything. Their primary interest in security, and open source is just a means to that end [counterpane.com].

      Not everybody who does Open Source is into the whole "community development" ideology. Some, such as the NSA and cryptography developers, are simply interested in the security advantages. Personally, I consider the main strength of Open Source to be its ability to create standards without falling into the design-by-committe trap. To see what I mean, compare KDE with CDE [opengroup.org].

  • Suggestion (Score:2, Informative)

    by Jailbrekr ( 73837 )
    as soon as it is mandatory for encryption to have a gov't controlled back door, fork the distribution and start developement outside of the USA, much like OpenBSD.

    The NSA is doing a bang up job, but their work will be seriously compromised if the USA Gov't is successful in legislating mandatory back doors in all encryption products.....
    • The only problem is the fork developers will have to worry about how their own government reacts to the US policy that any nation that doesn't support the US anti-terrorism is acting in support of terrorism.
    • as soon as it is mandatory for encryption to have a gov't controlled back door, fork the distribution and start developement outside of the USA, much like OpenBSD

      Interesting point, but i'm not sure how they would do that... It could be quite difficult to to backdoor an open source project without someone noticing, which would be fun.

      Ridiculously obfuscated code perhaps? I've heard the NSA are pretty good at this already...

  • Very flexible, lots of hooks (Score:5, Informative)

    by khym ( 117618 ) <`matt' `at' `nightrealms.com'> on Monday October 01, 2001 @04:30AM (#2372774)

    This is looking very nice. They're putting hooks into lots of places in the kernel. If the hooks themselves are accepted into the core kernel, then many of the different Linux security projects (like LIDS [lids.org]) will be able to work with little (or even no) kernel patching. It also has clean seperation between it's various components, so that anyone can plug in their own implentation of any of the sub-systems; thus, just like in Perl, ther'll be More Than One Way To Do It.

    • "They're putting hooks into lots of places in the kernel ... so that anyone can plug in their own implentation of any of the sub-systems"


      Does anyone else worry about the NSA making the Linux kernel easy to modify? All I could think about while reading the above comment was "what else are they planning to put in?" I am not normally a very paranoid person and I applaud the NSA for its effort, but I can't help but get the feeling that they should be watched like hawks.

      • Irrational Paranoia (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Carnage4Life ( 106069 ) on Monday October 01, 2001 @06:42AM (#2372923) Homepage Journal
        Does anyone else worry about the NSA making the Linux kernel easy to modify? All I could think about while reading the above comment was "what else are they planning to put in?"

        The NSA creates a system where you can plug in the security architecture that you want and you complain? Would you rather that they hardcoded it so only NSA provided security features could be used?

        I guess it just goes to show that you can't please everyone.
        • I wouldn't care if they hardcoded it; I wouldn't use their fork of the kernel then (and I am willing to bet that Linus wouldn't accept it either). What I am worried about is a system -- written by the NSA -- that happily accepts new sub-systems at run-time. Let me give you an example of what I am scared of: a worm (written by the NSA) that exploits Apache/bind/whatever and then installs some new sub-system. I realize this sort of thing can be done with modules, but it just worries me that there is yet antoher possible weakness in the kernel and that the NSA is the one putting it there.
          • ...but it just worries me that there is yet antoher possible weakness in the kernel and that the NSA is the one putting it there.

            You are not being reasonable. They are providing peer-reviewed well-architected security enhancements that fix almost all the hugest problems in operational security that Unix has ALWAYS had. Eventually, we will all use some version of these new ideas, because as you may have noticed, dividing processes into root/user just leads to root exploit after root exploit.

            This is all GPL'd and not terribly obfuscated. I really think that you need to get these anxious feelings under control.

            Marc
            • Eventually, we will all use some version of these new ideas, because as you may have noticed, dividing processes into root/user just leads to root exploit after root exploit.

              Sigh. Something that wouldn't happen if people would pay attention when they designed and wrote their root daemons. Qmail's never been cracked like that (No, I'm not saying I like DJB, but his code is pretty good.)

      • In addition to Carnage4Life's comments, I should point out that the first SELinux release was a direct patch.

        It was presented at a Kernel summit (I can't remember which) and one of the suggestions made was that the various people who were interested in increasing the security of Linux get together and work on a common set of hooks for SELinux, LIDS, etc. The hooks are the result of that.

  • This is NOT Encription (Score:5, Interesting)

    by |_uke ( 158930 ) <[moc.liamtoh] [ta] [flesretlaeht]> on Monday October 01, 2001 @04:36AM (#2372781) Homepage Journal
    Guys... come on. So far (at 1:26 am pst) Almost every post to this article is talking about encryption. Having an educated opinion is worth a lot more than an uneducated one. Do a little more research please :)

    This is NOT encryption. What SELinux provides is stronger access control mechanisms. This means that users and programs only have access they need in order to get their job done.

    This is a totally different thing from encryption. Encryption is one thing this is actually NOT touching. Encryption on most systems is useless if someone can break in and obtain the key needed to decript whatever you are trying to keep secret.

    In a environment with better access control, it makes it a LOT harder for someone to actually gain that type of access. If someone breaks into your mail daemon or your http daemon, they only gain the rights that program had, nothing more.

    I do agree however, that it is nice to see the government helping community (opensource/free speech) software. I think this is something we could use a lot more of.

  • Good to hear (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Good to hear that they're still actively working on this open source project, in light of the recent events. It seems at least some people at the NSA don't believe that banning security measures is the answer to all problems.
  • The NSA is responsible for national security... as the name implies.

    They desire (and probably have) access (however limited) to anything they want - private computer systems are a major hurdle in their mission to have complete access. What better way to change that than to release their OWN operating system, in the form of a Linux distro?

    They can't exactly introduce a brand new thing to compete with Windows or the MacOS; so join the Linux crowd. Perfect.

    Anyone who uses this is simply helping the NSA spin their web; and its getting bigger as always. Protect privacy... stick to YDL ;)

    • Re:...as far as I could throw 'em. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RollingThunder ( 88952 ) on Monday October 01, 2001 @06:15AM (#2372902)
      Well, enough people have said "read the source yourself", so I won't go into that.

      Here's the other way to look at it... as in "why would they do this?". If you consider the security of the servers used by american businesses as a national concern (and remember that the US Govt has a LONG history of getting involved JUST to help businesses), then helping make a stronger, more secure Linux kernel *IS* a national security issue.

      I'd go on in more detail but it's 3:20 AM and my wife is complaining. :)

      • The NSA has two tasks charged to it: 1) obtaining elint in non-US nations and 2) preventing other nations from gaining elint in the US.

        Part of the second task is securing US government systems. Many US gov't installations can only use Solaris, HPUX, and a few related Unices because they are the only ones that meet the NSA's standards for security. I imagine that the NSA realizes that if Linux were to be an option, they could actually save some money (which, instead of being spent elsewhere in the gov't could be spent at NSA...).

      • If you consider the security of the servers used by american businesses as a national concern (and remember that the US Govt has a LONG history of getting involved JUST to help businesses), then helping make a stronger, more secure Linux kernel *IS* a national security issue.
        I'd go on in more detail but it's 3:20 AM and my wife is complaining. :)

        In light of September 11, this shouldn't need any further detail.

    • The NSA used to be classified, the public simply did not know it existed. Now that we do know of it, I would bet that there is another organization that collects intel in more insidious ways and that its existance is highly classified. The very fact that I see the heads of the NSA on CNN and other news sources from time to time tells me that I needn't fear them as much as people here on /. seem to. If you're going to worry about the government spying on you, at least worry about a secret that they can't let you know.
  • There was Government one day, Who coded whilst hidden away. Then Linus Torvalds, Backed by the crowds, Surrendered the code and his sway.

  • Already Running a NSA Enhanced OS...Windows! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ron Bennett ( 14590 ) on Monday October 01, 2001 @05:10AM (#2372829) Homepage
    Just when I thought it was safe to run Linux on my home PC there comes this news. I'm still trying to figure out what that mysterious NSA registry key in Windows does...yes, such a key really exists in Windows - do a search here on Slashdot or Google for more info.

    Anything put out, funded, etc by the NSA or any other agency should be considered suspect until PROVEN otherwise...and before anyone here says "but it's open source"...keep in mind there have been numerous instances of serious bugs, weaknesses, etc found many years after various open source programs were released.

    Bottom line: Just because a particular program is open source, does NOT automatically mean that particular program can truly be trusted.

    • Read the source... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Carnage4Life ( 106069 ) on Monday October 01, 2001 @05:51AM (#2372878) Homepage Journal
      Anything put out, funded, etc by the NSA or any other agency should be considered suspect until PROVEN otherwise...and before anyone here says "but it's open source"...keep in mind there have been numerous instances of serious bugs, weaknesses, etc found many years after various open source programs were released.

      Bottom line: Just because a particular program is open source, does NOT automatically mean that particular program can truly be trusted.

      The NSA has published several research papers on on SE Linux as well as the OSes leading up to it (Flask, DTOS, DTMach) and it is hard to find malice in what they suggest should be how OSes should be improved security-wise.

      If you are so suspicious of SE Linux then don't install it or even better use the benefits of Open Source and actually read through source to see if the code matches what they claim in their research papers. Heck, diff the major source files against a stock distro and see what has changed and why. Open Source is of no benefit if people treat it like closed source and want everything handed to them on a platter.
      • If you are so suspicious of SE Linux then don't install it or even better use the benefits of Open Source and actually read through source to see if the code matches what they claim in their research papers.

        There lies the trick. They put hypnotic comments in their code so that everybody reading it will instantly and unknowingly become an NSA agent. And, what's worse, without pay.

    • Sure the NSA deserves a good look to when they submit source to the community. However this over zealous style of responding is a bit weird.

      I mean, of all the companies contributing crypto and security work, who do you know you can -absolutely- trust?

      I would think the NSA has the most to gain if this worked well (less work for them defending the information of this country), and the most to loose of they were cought doing a conspiricy (in open source plain sight no less).

      Double check any submission that claims to enhance security? sure, sounds healthy to me, however singling out the NSA will only make out state of security worse.
    • I mean, the USA != the world. If the NSA does something, or decides something, why should I find that a good thing? The NSA is an agency of a country where I don't live in, which has another system in place that spies on our economy (Echelon). Why on earth should I trust the NSA?

      ps: no, I'm not happy about the NSA approved keys in windows either, allthough these are not usable to enter a system.
    • Is that they can download the source themselves, and then compile their own binaries. There's no need to "trust" the program not to screw you over - if you have enough knowledge, you can examine the source yourself.

    • > Anything put out, funded, etc by the NSA or any other agency should be considered suspect until PROVEN otherwise...and before anyone here says "but it's open source"...keep in mind there have been numerous instances of serious bugs, weaknesses, etc found many years after various open source programs were released.

      And this is better than binary-only distros (whether from Micros~1 or the FreeBSD and Linux communities) how?

      If you're interested in securing a system, anything put out by anyone (yourself included) should be considered suspect until proven otherwise.

      NSA's involvement in SELinux is IMHO a red herring.

      And I think their track record is pretty good. I remember thinking for years that they weakened DES by h4x0ring the S-boxes and not telling anyone why, when it turns out there were strengthening it against an attack known at the time only to them.

      Remember - they have two missions. One, gathering intelligence from the assets other countries. Two, securing of American assets from the intelligence-gathering operations of other countries.

      I believe that SELinux is part of the second mission, not the first.

    • Bottom line: Just because a particular program is open source, does NOT automatically mean that particular program can truly be trusted.

      Well, as mentioned on their site they hope these patches will find their way into the 2.5 kernel. As such it would go the way other patches go too: code will be cleaned, modified, looked over, streamlined, whatever. In the process there will be individuals outside the NSA gaining deep insight into the inner workings of (parts) of this code, they would blow the whistle if anything is fishy, and it stands to hope, that the NSA knows better, than to gain a reputation as mischievous backdoor inserters. Also there are quite a few papers presented by them, and many of the ideas will find their ways into a secure Linux Distribution, be it the actual patches or not.

      Revised Bottom line: in a high profile project like this suspicious stuff will surface sooner or later, and the NSA knows this.
    • Bottom line: Just because a particular program is open source, does NOT automatically mean that particular program can truly be trusted.

      in a sense, this is true. However, i know that if my code can be read by the public, i'm not going to publish a bunch of hacked up, half assed code and attach my name to it. i'm going to make sure it's as solid as can be so someone out there might email me saying, 'damn fine job, sir'.

      think of it as quality control by programmers of the world.
      • Yeah, YOU will, but too many people aren't security-conscious enough. People don't check return codes where they should (close() is a good one), and they spend too much time hacking and not enough time planning and keeping the main design simple (see Gnome/KDE).


  • I am a Linux user for many years, and I have to admit that I do not put much emphasis on the security matter.

    In light of the NSA's seLinux, I want know if there are OTHER secure (and/or ultra-secure) version of Linux distros out there?

    Is there a portal somewhere dedicated to give users a taste of what is available out there?

    Any comments will be very much appreciated.

    Thank you.

  • On second thoughts... while I would trust this less than a tylenol I found on the street, think about this...

    Would you rather have the NSA, or some 1337 punk h4x0r break into your system? :\

    I've got nothing to hide from the NSA; and while in PRINCIPAL I still intensely dislike the whole thing, security wise this may be a wiser option.

    It may well leave the back door open to the NSA - but nobody else. If it can keep out "other" intruders better than any other distro... would you use it despite the ramifications of having the NSA being able to waltz right in?

    But then, there is always the possibility of the backdoor being found, or leaking; but in that situation a patch would be released immediately (its already prepared... ;)) fixing the backdoor and creating a new one.

    Oh well. Random thoughts.

  • It's not about Crypto - It's about access control! (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There is nothing in these patches that has to do with crypto. Stop whining about back doors, and at least read the FAQ!

    They are trying to move toward a structure of access controls, to limit the scope of exploits. I think this is a worthwhile effort, and their approach (ie., explaining that this is -a- way of doing this vs. -the- way of doing this) is laudable.

  • I am hoping that security like this goes into 2.5 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01, 2001 @06:15AM (#2372904)
    First of all, this in not about encryption.

    Linux already has security at the group and user level. But that is not good enough security for the real world.

    What security like this does is allow you very fine control over everything that a user or process is allowed to do or to access, right down to system calls.

    So, your web server is running and only has read access to it's config files, and write access to its logs and can only call the system calls that it needs to do it's job.

    Let's say that there is a buffer overflow in the web server and someone tried to exploit it. Geeze, they can't start a shell, because they don't have any access to a shell, the web server didn't need that access. So, even though there is a buffer overflow, they can't get a shell from it.

    Let's say that somehow they got a shell from this activity, all that the shell would have access to would be the web server content, config files, and log files and they could execute cgi scripts. And nothing else. And the cgi scripts would be locked down even tighter than the web server was. They couldn't even see anything that wasn't web related.

    The really nice thing about this level of security is that the concept of an all powerful root becomes almost meaningless. Any user can be granted specific rights to run certain programs.

    This means that administrators for each subsystem can have the rights they need to do their job.

    Where we do need encryption is a good directory service for Linux servers that would allow this level of security access controls at the enterprise level across 10's, 100's or even 10,000's of servers.

    Imagine being able to add a new person to a single database and instantly give them the rights that they need to do their job across a network that spans the globe. :) Oh yeah, and it has to support single login.

    Or is that just me? *L*
    • At the San Jose kernel summit earlier this year Linus blessed the concept of a pluggable/configurable kernel security system for Linux. The exact form of this interface is still being hashed out, but it is going to happen, in the 2.5 timeframe.

      With this new kernel interface you'll be able to set your system up to taste, with configurations running all the way from basic Unix security like we have now to the exotic super-security system flavor of the week.

  • If you read the FAQ.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by maroberts ( 15852 ) on Monday October 01, 2001 @06:46AM (#2372927) Homepage Journal
    ..you find that the changes are not about encryption, but preventing programs already on your system from doing something they shouldn't do. As the changes offer increased security from the basic kernel, the NSA won't be able to do anything with this that they can't do with your current system.

    As the NSA have released the source code for these changes I hardly see any reason why one should not run such a kernel. I may hesitate to run a binary from these guys, but if these changes get incorporated into the mainstream kernel I'll still run Linux.

    On another point, maybe it is worthwhile seeing what is required to get an increased security classification for Linux; the FAQ raises some interesting issues in the form of documentation and auditing. Maybe the first could be performed under the auspices of the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) and some of the other secure Linux distributors would be interested in coordinating the latter.

    If Linux was approved as a secure OS, then takeup by goverments would be much more enthusiastic, and as civil service employment would require at least Linux desktop knowledge, that would lead to a need for it to be taught in schools, which is where hopefully the next generation fo kids won't grow up to by Windows lusers. [bit like a reverse of the fear leads to anger...to the Dark Side argument, isn't it? :-) ]


  • I wonder if they have installed some hard
    to find backdoors so that they can get into
    the "secure" systems ...

    Remember the mysterious NSA_KEY they found in the
    Windows code ?
    • I haven't counted how many posters here have pointed out that it's open source and will be looked at by dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of suspicious eyes before any of this is added to the kernel -- and still posts like this are popping up.

      What you're basically positing is that the NSA programmers are so superhumanly clever and cunning, with such godlike mastery of the craft, that they have deliberately devised such tricks and back doors with FULL CONFIDENCE that not one non-government open-source coder will ever, ever spot them -- until it's too late and those back doors are being exploited.

      This suffers from the same flaws as hundreds of conspiracy theories about the spook agencies: it credits the government agency involved with fiendish cleverness and foresight beyond all imagination. Do you see any signs that *any* portion of the federal government, the CIA and FBI included, have that kind of genius? Are they really that competent? Look at the record.

      It's like a guest speaker for my journalism course once remarked: he didn't believe in government conspiracies because most of those people aren't capable of running a conspiracy!
  • If people would bother to click on the link in the story, you would be able to remove the tin hats and stop whining about encryption backdoors and black helicopters.

    This is the text of the abstract of the NSA project. You can find it here http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/policy_abstract.html

    The security architecture of the system is general enough to support many security policy abstractions. The access controls in the implemention currently support a combination of two, type enforcement and role-based access control. This combination was chosen because togther they provide powerful tools to construct useful security policies. The specific policy that is enforced by the kernel is dictated by security policy configuration files which include type enforcement and role-based access control components.

    The type enforcement component defines an extensible set of domains and types. Each process has an associated domain, and each object has an associated type. The configuration files specify how domains are allowed to access types and to interact with other domains. They specify what types (when applied to programs) can be used to enter each domain and the allowable transitions between domains. They also specify automatic transitions between domains when programs of certain types are executed. Such transitions ensure that system processes and certain programs are placed into their own separate domains automatically when executed.

    The role-based access control component defines an extensible set of roles. Each process has an associated role. This ensures that system processes and those used for system administration can be separated from those of ordinary users. The configuration files specify the set of domains that may be entered by each role. Each user role has an initial domain that is associated with the user's login shell. As users execute programs, transitions to other domains may, according to the policy configuration, automatically occur to support changes in privilege.
  • Every once and a while, you just have to step back from the paranoia and look at things whith a differnt light. NSA's got TWO jobs. One, the get all the fun information we can on other countries. Note that thats other countries, because they are by law fordbiden from spying on us citizens, and by an executive order since 1978 from having any other country do spying on us citizens for them. Yes, and i still belive echlon doesn't do what everybody thinks it does. The second mission of NSA, however, is INFOSEC, or information security. This role of NSA is to create defensive information operations to achive information assurance (nice bit of buzz words there). Basically, this means NSA wants american goverments and critical commercial utilities (like phone companies and such) to use more secure systems. For them having more secure version on Linux on theese systems, or any more secure os, would be a good thing.

  • Seems they need it ! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Qcrypt ( 523428 )
    It seems NSA needs a "security enhanced" OS for its own website. If you look at the statistic of their website [netcraft.com] on netcraft , it seems that they have to reboot their solaris servers every 3 days !
  • I don't know if I would trust a version of linux produced by NSA. We all saw what happened with the clipper chip, and other things that they have done. Although if they have open sourced it, then someone could anaylize the code. I am not that good. In the mean time, has anyone seen Enguard Linux (http://www.enguard.org)? It is supposedly very secure. If that is so, then what do we need the NSA version for?

  • Two can keep a secret if one is dead (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Monday October 01, 2001 @09:24AM (#2373246)
    I'm getting sick of all the paranoid types here going on and on about how it's antithetical of the NSA to make a truly secure product for the masses, you can't trust them, blah blah blah...

    Secure encryption is a matter of national security. It's a matter of an American company being able to keep its secrets secure from foreign competition (amongst other things). It's about AMD being able to make a new innovation, for instance, without having to worry about Hitachi "coincidentally" and suddenly patenting that same innovation before AMD gets to the patent office.

    If you're going to have to rely on such a program for the validity of the economy (et al), there is no logical reason to shoot yourself in the foot by installing back doors in all such software. That secret back door cannot stay a secret forever. All it requires is one act of treason for that "secret" back door to be just about anything but (possibly even public domain).

    Yes, I know the FBI wants escrow encryption, but even then that's only giving the Feds the ability to get to the keys to decrypt it (with a court order), not some magic key of their own. Because again, that magic key is one act of treason away from the public domain.

    And here comes the flame...

    It disturbs me how many posts on here all say the same thing: "It says 'NSA,' so therefore it must be bad." And yet, surprisingly enough, nobody has yet to find any such super secret NSA log-in account in the open source code. This gut reaction reminds me too much of the people who were saying as early as the evening of September 11th that it was all an ATF plot. Can't you people think differently for once, especially when there's no logical reason not to? I pity you for not being able to change gears every once in a while. If Congress passed a resolution delcaring the sky was blue, where would that leave you?

    Blind distrust of the government is just as bad as blind trust, if not moreso. At least with blind trust it demonstrates the ability to trust something, and you can go out of the house every once in a while without putting your aluminum foil suit on...
  • Why would the NSA have any interest in making it harder for them to access what's stored on your computer?

    • Simple (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Simple, The NSA is not only responsible for foreign signals intelligence, but is also responsible for PROTECTION of US communications from being exploited. Obviously it is in the best interest of United States for there to be an agency (in this case the NSA) providing a secure OS for use of the military, government and industrial complex.

  • Our National Security (Score:2, Informative)

    by Ray Yang ( 135542 )
    You know, with all due respect, I think a lot of slashdotters have watched too many reruns of the X-Files. The NSA is an agency charged with defending the United States *against* threats to national security. As recent events (not WTC, but rather the slew of worms and virii) have demonstrated, one of the greatest threats to our electronic infrastructure is having a few gazillion easily hackable machines on the Internet. It's part of their mission to prevent that. After all, it's not like they haven't done it before.

    Yes, the NSA has acted to help Americans protect our secrets before. Why? Because it helps our country for banks, companies, and people to be able to do their work without fear of their private data being stolen. For those of us who follow encryption, recall that NSA helped IBM optimize DES against differential cryptanalysis, long before differential cryptanalysis was a public technique (yes, they also limited keylength, but presumably that was to set things up so that they could break in, but only in emergencies with a *lot* of effort -- it still takes 24-odd hours for modern specially designed machines to break DES, do you think the NSA could have done better in the late 70s?).

    Even when they were trying to foist Clipper off on us, the people over at NSA always acknowledged that helping Americans (and the global economy) maintain secure systems is a good thing. As lots of people have pointed out, SeLinux is about access controls, not encryption. The NSA has every reason to help develop secure products so that large groups of Internet servers are not easily hacked, and no reason to install a backdoor which anybody could discover (and, if unethical, exploit) simply by perusing the source code.

    That said, if you're qualified, feel free to browse the code -- being careful is good, but being paranoid and reflexively hostile to people who devote their lives to public service is bad.
  • including the bonus undocumented Ashcroft server!
  • Most of the comments here are stupid. Read the documentation for NSA's Secure Linux. This is a proof-of-concept system to determine whether mandatory security can be retrofitted to Linux and still have the system be usable.

    What to do with it?
    1) come up with a mandatory security policy that makes sense in a web server environment, and
    2) modify Apache to live within that security policy. At that point, you have a secure web server that stays secure even if the web server has holes. That's what this is all about.

    Mandatory security actually works; it's just hard to live with. It means things like "administrator programs can't read lower-level data." That prevents them from becoming contaminated with viruses, but it's a pain to live with.

    The key to all this is that the amount of trusted software becomes much smaller. Everything that ever runs as "root" under UNIX is trusted. In a mandatory security environment, only a few programs have strong privileges. Typically, these are dumb little programs that do one job (like installing user accounts or copying files for backup) and nothing else. You never trust something big like EMACS.

  • Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Monday October 01, 2001 @03:04PM (#2374873)
    Everyone is talking about either remote exploits, or encryption, or NSA backdoors...

    SElinux has NOTHING to do with any of those...
    IT's about intenral access controls for applications so they only have access to the resources they need to get the job done.

    So, in the future, say, a large, huge server can run *securely* where differnet internal users are safer from each other.
  • Now the major distros can fork off a SELinux product. Just think about "NSA Secured Linux" or some such...IBM is probably gonna be all over this. Between the security enhancemnts and new file systems...i may finally have to live on the bleeding edge when the 2.5 serries comes out....
  • Argh... why did I miss this thread until it was pushed into the sidebar.

    I'm surprised no one mentioned this: does this mean that the U.S. goverment is going to do as some Slashdotters have suggested? They have, after all, found Microsoft guilty of breaking certain anti-trust laws. Perhaps this is the first move in divesting the government from being a customer of a convicted corporation.

    Before Linux is ready for the U.S. government's sensitive information, time for a security overhaul. What better group to give that job to than the NSA? And they will play by the book and release the source, as they of all groups know the value of security through obscurity (none.) They might even get a few tips from Linux kernel hax0rs on possible 'sploits they disregarded, as they also know where the know-how (and the willingness to help out) is.

    Now that one U.S. government agency will have a certified secure OS that they were able to review and alter the source code of, which doesn't have any backdoors and has true modular security (none of which can be said of closed-source Windows, where there is not six but one degree of separation and a bug in a minor support .DLL can be exploited for full root) how many other departments will we see switch in the next few years?

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