Red Hat lands top security certification for latest Enterprise Linux

Red Hat didn’t announce a customer “win” on Monday – but something much more important.

Its top product for enterprise networks has received top security certification from the federal government.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 – the latest version – landed the much sought after Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+, which Red Hat says is the “highest level of assurance: available for an “unmodified commercial operating system.”

By the way, RHEL 6 includes Security-Enhanced Linux, which was part of a project developed along with the National Security Agency.

Government agencies, the Pentagon and Wall Street financial firms are among RHEL customers.

The certification covers RHEL 6 running on Dell, HP, IBM and SGI machines.

ASTEC Information Security, a U.S. government accredited lab, tested and validated security, performance and reliability. Certification came through BSI, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security, which also certifies the ASTEC lab.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was certified by BSI, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security. To facilitate this certification, Red Hat worked with atsec information security, a U.S. government and BSI accredited laboratory, which tested and validated the security, performance and reliability of the solution against the Common Criteria Standard for Information Security Evaluatio

“This 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 Paul Smith, general manager for Public Sector operations at Red Hat. “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.”