Red Hat announced on Monday that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, including the KVM hypervisor, has been awarded the Common Criteria certification at evaluation assurance level 4+, the highest level for an unmodified commercial operating system.
The CC is an internationally recognized set of standards used by the federal government and other organizations to assess the security and assurance of technology products.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 features Security-Enhanced Linux, a joint project developed with the National Security Agency. The CC certification provides assurance that using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with the KVM hypervisor allows providers to host many tenants on the same machine while keeping their virtual guests separated from each other using mandatory access control technology developed by NSA.
“This is marks our 15th completed Common Criteria certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, earning Red Hat a place at the top of the list of the industry’s most certified operating systems,” said Red Hat U.S. Public Sector Vice President and General Manager Paul Smith. “We’ve been deeply committed to security certifications so that customers can confidently turn to Red Hat for the expertise to deploy open source solutions at maximum security levels, and our work with Dell, HP, IBM and SGI on this certification reinforces that government customers can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux with confidence on a wide variety of hardware from many of the industry’s top providers.”
