By IT-Observer Staff
Wednesday, 28 September 2005 14:18 EST

Red Hat and IBM announced on Tuesday that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is in evaluation state to meet government security standards for assured information sharing within government agencies.

Red Hat officially joined The National Information Assurance Partnership to bring an improved level of security and assurance to Linux. This means that the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will contain kernel and Security Enhanced Linux policy enhancements, developed by IBM, Red Hat, TCS, NSA and the community.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux will join an exclusive community of trusted operating systems that have achieved this level of security," said Ed Hammersla, chief operating officer at TCS. "The powerful collaboration between IBM, Red Hat, NSA and TCS is going to shake things up, and means our customers have a safe open source alternative to run our SecureOffice suite of application software."

The joint effort will bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux to reach a level of security previously achieved by only a handful of trusted operating systems. Red Hat is now able to provide best-of-breed security features for businesses, commercial operating systems and the government.

"In a relatively short period of time Linux has come to be known as a standard, secure computing platform," said Brian Stevens, vice president of Operating Systems Development at Red Hat.

"This new level of certification is a testament to the power of collaboration. IBM, TCS, the NSA, Red Hat and the community have worked together to bring the Linux platform forward with rapid innovation in the area of security. This collaboration and evaluation effort will make Red Hat Enterprise Linux the most secure open source operating system platform available."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.5 will be available in late 2006.