RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating [LWN.net]

RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating

Posted Sep 27, 2005 19:55 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating by ncm
Parent article: RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating

> Unfortunately a certified RHEL wouldn't give anybody (except RH themselves) a bidding advantage

Maybe you haven't heard, but RHEL is an open source operating system. You are free to take the code (that's already been certified) and run certification for your own flavour you're building from it. I reckon that's a huge advantage for *all* Linux distros, not just Red Hat.

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RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating

Posted Sep 29, 2005 4:03 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link]

The whole product is certified, not just chunks of code. Having RHEL certified will make it easier for other vendors to get certified (although there's a lot to the certification package which won't be available under an open source license, particularly documentation) but any individual components you extract and put in another similar-but-slightly-different environment will have no special status what-so-ever.

RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating

Posted Sep 29, 2005 5:30 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Of course, but consider this. If you are building an OS and want it EAL 4 certified, does the fact that Windows is certified help you? Not much. If you are building an open source operating system, maybe even based on RHEL5 source, does the fact that it is certified help you? A lot more - you have the same source!

For instance, if CentOS wanted to certify their version 5, it would be much easier for them to do so (in terms of work required) once RHEL5 gets certified. No proprietary OS can claim the same. In other words, even in the certification space, the barrier to entry is reduced through open source.