Last quarter Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3 was awarded Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2 certification by the UK IT Security Evaluation and Certification Scheme. The evaluation is in compliance with the U.S. government's security policy directives. The Common Criteria Scheme enables consumers to obtain an impartial assessment of an IT product by an independent lab. This impartial assessment, or security evaluation, includes an analysis of the IT product and the testing of the product for conformance to a set of security requirements. Security standards play a critical role in today's computing architecture and Red Hat is working to achieve higher levels of security evaluation with EAL 3 and 4 certification in future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

A second security accomplishment for Red Hat is the certification from Mitre for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) compatibility for Security Advisories. CVE aims to standardize the names for all publicly known vulnerabilities and security exposures to simplify security practices. Red Hat is the only Linux vendor to be awarded this certification for security standards.

Most recently made available in March as part of Fedora Core 2, test 2, Security Enhanced Linux is the most significant milestone in Red Hat's security roadmap for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Benefits to customers with an implementation of SELinux will be reduced risk and exposure to many of the common security vulnerabilities as well as system access control at a much more granular level. SELinux will be fully integrated and available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 4 in early 2005. For more information on EAL, CVE or other standards, please visit http://www.redhat.com/. To download Fedora Core 2, test 2, with SELinux please visit http://fedora.redhat.com.