Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, KVM to Pursue Security Certification

11. August 2010Red Hat Enterprise Linux Team

We’re excited to announce that Red Hat® has entered into an agreement with atsec information security to certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+, which will include certifying the KVM hypervisor on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Common Criteria EALs represent the depth and rigor of the evaluation, giving consumers the confidence that products certified at a specific level meet the package of security assurance requirements associated with that level and comply with internationally recognized security standards.

Common Criteria certifications aren’t new to Red Hat, either. To date, we’ve successfully achieved Common Criteria certification 13 different times on four different platforms, earning Red Hat Enterprise Linux a place at the top of the list of the industry’s most certified operating systems. By pursuing this new certification, we’re adding to our leadership in this area and giving customers in security-sensitive environments, such as government agencies and financial services organizations, added confidence that our solutions meet their strict security requirements.

This certification also marks as an important milestone for Red Hat as a virtualization industry leader. By pursuing certification at EAL 4+, Red Hat is giving government customers all of the benefits of virtualization with the confidence that their virtualization solution is rock solid and meets the industry’s security standards. Providers can safely host many tenants on the same machine, knowing that their virtual guests will be separated from each other using technology developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). By taking advantage of the combined power of SELinux and KVM, we were able to quickly pursue this certification – another example of the feature velocity afforded by the open source process.

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