Securing Operating Systems

Abstract

The importance of Operating System Security has been well known for the last twenty five years. While there have been great strides in the development of mechanisms for application space security mechanisms the area of operating system security has largely been neglected. Today’s trends of distributed computing and the increased possibility for malicious attacks have shown the need to implement mandatory control mechanisms and policy flexibility. This paper discusses the need for greater operating system security and mandatory access mechanisms. It further discusses the Flask Architecture Implementation of these mechanisms and also the SELinux implementation which is based on the Flask Architecture.