Integrity-178B is now EAL6+

Posted by Ken Y-N on December 1st, 2008 at 01:34pm

Wow, I’m seriously impressed, having attended a few lectures on what exactly all the various EALs (Evaluation Assurance Levels) mean, to see that Green Hills Sofware have announced that their operating system Integrity-178B has been rated by a National Security Agency-run certification process as EAL6+. To market this, the highest-rated OS in the world, they have formed a subsiduary, Integrity Global Security, targeting both the private and public sectors.

As a comparison, Windows and Linux are rated as EAL 4+ (I think this is only when not networked and for Windows at least, with no floppy drive), which basically means they can only survive a casual hacker. On the other hand, with Integrity it has been proved that malicious (or just buggy) code cannot affect any other application within the system.

As the operating system provides a hypervisor, standard operating systems such as Windows, Linux and MacOS can run on top of it, but even if one gets comprimised, this cannot be used as a springboard to attach the hypervisor or other guest operating systems. It will also run under Solaris on workstations, and Palm and Symbian on PDAs.

The trusted computing link is obviously that this operating system can provide a trusted computing base, and is perhaps even a competitor for Open Kernel Labs’ OKL4.

Read the full story on DarkReading here.

Tags: darkreading, eal, integrity

Under General Tags: darkreading, eal, integrity