RBAC for the masses!

In the past, advanced security features where only available to proprietary operating systems and applications. Namely some of the well known advanced operating system security features appear in the following (MAC/RBAC/Resources/compartmentalization etc..) :

• Trusted Solaris


• IBM RACF


• CA ACF2


• CA Top Secret


• HP-UX Virtual Vault

The open source evolution

With the inclusion of the LSM (Linux security module) framework into the open source GNU/Linux kernel the Linux operating system (beginning of 2002) became the idle platform for accommodating new advanced security features based on an open standard specification.

The US National Security Agency developed the SELinux software components and helped integrate them into the GNU/Linux OS by developing the SELinux LSM. The SELinux LSM added native RBAC functionality to the Linux OS.
SELinux has been integrated into version 2.6 series of the linux kernel.

In 2008 Sun Microsystems released the first version of an open source UNIX System V derivative. In the same year Sun announced the collaboration of Sun with the NSA in an effort to incorporate their security research into an OpenSolaris community project called Flexible Mandatory Access Control (FMAC).

Advanced OS security features become available to the public and are now included in all major Linux distributions and the OpenSolaris project.