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

RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating

Posted Sep 29, 2005 4:03 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872)
In reply to: RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating by bojan
Parent article: RHEL 5 going for Common Criteria EAL 4 rating

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.

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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.