Trusted Operating Systems

Trusted Operating Systems are ones which have been specially modified to be so secure as to be almost unusable! They afford maximum security for those systems which require it .....

The reason for this development is due to the substantial rise in concern over the apparent ease by which hackers are able to gain access to seemingly secure systems, a number of vendors have developed variations on mainstream version of UNIX and Windows® which go well beyond the standard Operating System hardening which is advisable for all and any desktop and server systems.

However, the deployment of a trusted Operating system, does require substantially more training of your systems operations staff as, no longer does the Administrator necessarily have 'ultimate power'. Henceforth the functions which control say, file, print or network access, are now split into separate 'sandboxes' which permit only a subset of actions to be performed by one systems administrator. It will be apparent that a substantially higher degree of coordination is required with the systems Operations team, and also a much deeper level of planning before any changes are made.

Whilst this may appear to be a high overhead; it does prevent a system from gradually being changed over time by a single systems' Administrator making small changes 'here and there'. In effect the Operating System is locked down and such Trusted Systems lend themselves to any e-commerce business where maximum security is paramount; say e-banking.