Sun Solaris getting security, virtualization boosts

12.12.2006
Sun Microsystems is sprucing up its Solaris 10 operating system with security and virtualization improvements.

Today's release of Solaris 10 11/06 is intended to make Solaris the most secure OS in existence, said Tom Goguen, Sun vice president of Solaris marketing. Next year, Sun will incorporate the open Xen hypervisor, for virtualization of an OS, into Solaris 10, Goguen said during a press briefing at Sun offices in San Francisco.

The new release of Solaris is undergoing governmental Common Criteria Certification based on EAL (Evaluation Assurance Level) 4+ with three Protection Profiles. EAL is a global specification accepted by governments around the world, Goguen said.

Featured in the new version of Solaris are trusted extensions, including multilevel security, for attaching a security profile or tag to every object dealt with by the OS, Goguen explained. With this level of security, the OS, for example, could permit someone viewing top secret and secret documents to cut and paste from the top secret to the secret document, but prevent the converse of this.

Also featured in the 11/06 release is a "secure by default" capability. "Out of the box, everything is designed to be locked down," said Goguen. Sun's security enhancements are featured in both the commercial and open source variants of Solaris. The open source release is under the jurisdiction of .

The new release also boasts Solaris Containers virtualization technology that provides secure containers for running applications within the OS. The Containers software has been made more mobile, enabling the cloning of a container and the capability to move it to other systems or have it run on an array of systems.