Despite what others might be claiming what is supposed to be the most secure operating system, the people who are charged with protecting the most sensitive and critical information, are still largely deploying multi-level secure operating systems such as Trusted Solaris.

Starting today you can download (for free – registration required) Trusted Solaris Extensions as part of the latest Solaris 10 11/06 release.

Add-On Package For Solaris
Unlike Trusted Solaris which was a standalone OS, Trusted Extensions is an add-on package that can simply be installed on top of Solaris 10. It’s still the only commercially available system with a fully functional Multi-Level desktop - you can choose between CDE or GNOME.

Who needs Multi-level security?
Imagine you would have one security level just for your web activity, one for your sensitive data such as your tax or financial information, one for your private files – all of them completely separated from each other but yet, without being afraid of malware or any other attacks. If you want to move data from one level to the other you can still do that if you want to. There are a variety of other use cases including trusted gateway solutions that act as data classification systems, multi-level file and database servers. However, most organizations value the multi-level desktop capabilities, allowing end-users to work on multiple security levels at the same time.

Multi-level GNOME Destkop: Each workspace has a color which defines its security level and the tooltips indicate the name of the level

Need Source Code?
Trusted Extensions is also included as part of the OpenSolaris efforts.

You can read the full announcement, including Sun’s plans for Common Criteria evaluation here.

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