NSA Security Enhanced Linux: Improving Cybersecurity Adoption Challenges

The National Security Agency built a version of Linux with more security tools that its technologists believe could help make the country's computing infrastructure less vulnerable. They've won over the Linux developer community with the changes. But success depends on its adoption by U.S. companies and government agencies, something that remains very much in doubt.

For more than a decade, the National Security Agency has worked on a way to use a computer's operating systems to control how software applications and users can access data. The agency succeeded years ago in creating these "mandatory access-control" features for specialized operating systems, but very few users deployed them. Taking a gamble in 2000 on the emerging Linux operating system, NSA started applying its security approach to the open-source code. The result is Security Enhanced Linux, which it hopes can raise the nation's overall level of cybersecurity.

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