TrustedBSD Extensions Project

[Brooks Davis]

On Wed, Apr 12, 2000 at 02:06:44PM -0400, stanislav shalunov wrote:
> This seems to contradict the very definition of B1.
> I've never worked for U.S. government (and couldn't even if I wanted
> to), so I've no idea if what you're saying is accurate.
> 
> B1 requires separation of information.
> 
> The reason your "touch rule" applies to PCs I assume is that they do
> not have a B1 or greater OS installed on them.

That's probalby true.  I seriously doubt that B1 certification would be
forthcoming for any PC hardware currently avaialble.  In practice, the
systems I've dealt with have either relied on physicaly sepearting data
of different classifications or by clearly delineating the boundries.
For example, running red data on a black network is done by border
routers making point-to-point crypto links between them selves over the
black network.  This is the normal way to do things.  I think the B1
seperation of data is a very good thing, but in practice, I don't think
it is used all that much.  There are just too many oportunities to screw
up.  The controler example for instance.

My view is that we should simply concentrate on the software side of
things.  We don't have much control over the hardware side and unless
we actually want a real certification it's not very important except to
the extremaly, excessivly paranoid.  Also, hopefully, by the time we
get the software in shape, we'll have ports to other platforms which
are more likely to have certifiable hardware (i.e. SPARC).

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo at trustedbsd.org
with "unsubscribe trustedbsd-discuss" in the body of the message