It’s not very often we get to post anything related to the National Security Agency. There’s a good reason for that. They don’t exactly encourage open discussions of their practices. And this has to be the first time I’ve ever used the terms Open Source and the N.S.A. is the same sentence. But in this case, there actually is news from N.S.A., and it involves their interest in the Open Source operating system Linux.

In this official publication, the Agency announces the availability of Security-Enhanced Linux. While this isn’t intended for home use, in certain business environments it could be a perfect security solution.

“End systems must be able to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements to provide system security. Operating system security mechanisms are the foundation for ensuring such separation. Unfortunately, existing mainstream operating systems lack the critical security feature required for enforcing separation: mandatory access control. As a consequence, application security mechanisms are vulnerable to tampering and bypass, and malicious or flawed applications can easily cause failures in system security.

The results of several previous research projects in this area have been incorporated in a security-enhanced Linux system. This version of Linux has a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture incorporated into the major subsystems of the kernel. The system provides a mechanism to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements. This allows threats of tampering and bypassing of application security mechanisms to be addressed and enables the confinement of damage that can be caused by malicious or flawed applications.

There is still much work needed to develop a complete security solution. In addition, due to resource limitations, we have not yet been able to evaluate and optimize the performance of the security mechanisms. Currently, we can only support the x86 architecture and have only been able to test it on Red Hat distributions. Nonetheless, we feel we have presented a good starting point to bring valuable security features to Linux. We are looking forward to building upon this work with the Linux community.

Security-enhanced Linux is being released under the same terms and conditions as the original sources. “

This is a huge step forward for an Agency that until the 1960″s wouldn’t even admit its own existence. If you have need for a secure computing environment, you couldn’t ask for a better developer.