I'm glad to share that the Open Source Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) has received the highest globally recognized level of certification for any commercial OS - the Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL 4+), including 2 Protection Profiles, CAPP and RBAC PP. The protection profile LSPP is currently under evaluation on Open Source Solaris 10 with Trusted Extensions.
Open Source Solaris 10 allows customers, who have specific regulatory or information protection requirements, to take advantage of labeling features previously only available in highly specialized operating systems or appliances.
So, what does this mean?
At Sun, we continue to lead with Certified Open Source Operating Systems that will run on X86/X64 or SPARC hardware from any vendor, at a lower support cost than RedHat. The Open Source Solaris 10 certification was even completed months ahead of the timeline we expected.
Earning Common Criteria certification further validates the relevancy of Sun's open source operating systems and provides further choices to our customers at a reduced cost.
What’s Next?
Open Source Solaris 10 with Trusted Extensions (TX) is currently undergoing certification testing for LSPP, a requirement for financial, healthcare and government customers that need to protect the use of data with different classifications (top secret, secret, public) on the same systems. We expect LSPP certification later in 2007.
Once the Solaris 10 TX LSPP certification is complete, government agencies that run on an Open Source Solaris 10 platform can host and process information labeled "Top Secret" or "Classified" on the same system as information labeled "Public" or "Unclassified." Solaris 10 TX will also support labels with any file system, labeled networking for secure networks, labeled printing, a full multi-level desktop using the GNOME-based Java Desktop System and CDE, and support for bothSPARC(R) processor-based and x86/x64 systems.
The Common Criteria testing was conducted by CGI Information Systems and Management Consultants, Inc., in Ottawa, Canada. The Solaris 10 OS was tested on a variety of systems, including SPARC processor-based servers and Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers powered by the AMD Opteron processor.
