Posted on 11/16/2003 4:49:41 PM PST by yhwhsman
The Feds Love Linux
Erika Brown, 06.20.03, 8:20 AM ET
NEW YORK - Three weeks ago, John P. Stenbit, chief information officer of the U.S. Department of Defense, issued an agencywide memo that has Linux lovers rejoicing. The brief outlined the DOD's policy on acquiring, using and developing open-source software, including the Linux operating system. By creating an official policy, the DOD is "outing" open source, a technology that was stuck in government limbo, neither condoned nor outlawed.
"People used to think they'd get fired if they talked about it. It was 'Don't ask, don't tell,'" says Tony M. Stanco, founding director of the Center of Open Source & Government, a policy think tank. "But now that the DOD has legitimized open source, people won't be afraid to come out and say that they use it."
The government may be Linux's main squeeze for a while. Corporate IT spending is expected to be flat this year. In contrast, the U.S. government will spend an estimated $59 billion on tech in 2003, up 7% from last year. Tech giants such as Computer Sciences (nyse: CSC - news - people ), Dell (nasdaq: DELL - news - people ), IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ), Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) and Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) are typically the biggest beneficiaries of federal spending. Of note: Through products sold by those companies, the government may already be consuming more open-source software than it thinks.
While the DOD is not stating a preference for open source, it is the first federal agency to officially sanction its use, placing it on equal footing with proprietary technology.
"There are de facto policies by other agencies, but we were the first to put it on paper," says Robert Gorrie, deputy director of the Defense Information Assurance Program, a DOD unit. "We said to the developers, 'Use the things that are best for you. It's a level playing field...go for it.' "
The DOD's approval seems a bit late in coming; a recent report confirms that the agency has been a fan of open source for some time. In January, MITRE, a not-for-profit organization that does research on government projects, published a 168-page report commissioned by the Defense Information Systems Agency which identified 115 open-source applications already at work within the DOD. They included Apache, Linux via Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), Perl and Sendmail as well as lesser-known programs such as Snort, Squid and SATAN.
The upshot of the report: Open source is critical to the DOD's central nervous system. The study found at least 251 "free and open-source" projects under way. It concluded that if open source were banned from the DOD, costs would spike as capability and security dropped. Specifically, it would have "an especially negative impact" on software development and "immediate, broad and in some cases strongly negative impacts on the ability of the DOD to analyze and protect its own networks against hostile intrusion."
Linux offers the government plenty of benefits. It increases the reliability and performance of older systems that can't handle the upgrade to heavyweight Windows, which helps to extend tight budgets. In research, open-source code can link PCs to supercomputers, an area with no equivalent commercial alternative. It also enables agencies to use the best technologies available and then continue to improve upon them.
The term "open source" may sound like an invitation to be hacked, but Linux is often more secure than proprietary systems. In defense and security, the attitude is that if the code can't be seen, it can't be trusted--it could be riddled with bugs, loopholes and hidden backdoors. But technological diversity lowers the risk of cyber-attacks on widely deployed systems. And when an emergency hits, agencies want to solve problems quickly by getting inside the base code without being dragged down by some company's damage-control center.
The National Security Agency, renowned for its cryptography talent, has made Linux security even better. In March 2001 the NSA released the code to a security-enhanced version of Linux, which it built in-house. Dubbed "SE Linux," the program has since been weaved into security programs developed in the private and public sectors, including weapons systems used in Iraq.
The feds have plenty of other open-source programs in the works. The Department of Energy and NASA both use Linux to make custom software programs for research and development. The National Nuclear Security Administration is working on a project with Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) to develop "Lustre," a Linux-based file system designed to work on high-powered computer clusters. James Kane, chief executive of market intelligence firm Federal Sources, says the government is running dozens more open-source pilot projects.
One more sign that Linux and the feds are getting cozy: In late April, General H. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined Red Hat's board of directors.
The sentence I marked in bold is one benefit I see in the Linux debate. I recently installed Slackware 9.0 on a P200, and it runs great.
"One more sign that Linux and the feds are getting cozy: In late April, General H. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined Red Hat's board of directors."
Whaaaaaaaa ha ha ha! This gives credibility to Linux? A has-been general that fell off a ladder?
Oops...maybe so....there are still some loose "rungs" in Linux that isn't being talked about openly.
Wanna be Penguified? Just holla!
Got root?
Knowing the algorythms does not necesarily make a system insecure. The algorythms determine how keys are made and used, but does not reveal the keys themselves. In fact, allowing them to be reviewed by the IT/Security population at large, it is possible that a potential security flaw in the code is discovered and corrected more quickly.
As keys have increased in size: 56, 128, 256, 512 bits, they become exponentially harder to crack because the number of permitations makes it difficult if not possible to run through them all in a realistic timeframe, even with the use of a "super-computer".
The problem with larger keys in the past has been the speed at which files could be encrypted or decrypted (with the keys). The larger the cypher, the longer it took. With todays higher processing speeds this is becoming less an issue.
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