CSPRI Soon to Launch SELinux University Consortium

GW’s Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute (CSPRI) will soon launch the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) University Consortium using seed money provided by the National Security Agency (NSA). The research and development activities will be located at the GW’s Virginia Campus, where researchers aim to create a complete, usable, state-of-the-art, secure, open-source operating system based on SELinux. Participants in the Consortium hope to create a community of researchers, educators, developers, users, and administrators, actively participating in and using the secure operating system.

In the past few years, threats to cyberspace have risen dramatically, and as a result the national security of the United States is at risk of a debilitating disruption of its information systems. Because the healthy functioning of cyberspace is essential to the U.S. economy and national security, the NSA considers the creation of a viable secure operating system to be a critical research problem.

The NSA’s Information Assurance Research Office, therefore, initiated SELinux, whose goal is the creation of an efficient architecture that provides support for security, and executes programs in a way that is largely transparent to the user and attractive to vendors, so that security controls can be successfully integrated into mainstream operating systems. The Consortium—built from academia, government, and the open-source community—will provide stewardship of the entire SELinux project, safeguarding its name, origin, goals and essential features.

The objectives of the project are to create research and development that can be commercialized to prevent cyber attacks against the nation's critical infrastructure, and to minimize damage and recovery time from cyber attacks that do occur. In particular, the project aims to complete the development of SELinux and its integration into a standard distribution of Linux; to stimulate research on future secure operating systems; to incorporate research results from academia directly into a next version of SELinux; to develop programs on open-source SELinux through educational grants to the Centers of Academic Excellence; and to train the next generation of computer science students to contribute to open-source projects.

The SELinux University Consortium project will be led by Professor Dianne Martin, director of CSPRI and chair of the Department of Computer Science, and Tony Stanco, associate director of CSPRI. Other SEAS computer science faculty involved in this effort include Professors Bhagirath Narahari, Hyeong-Ah Choi, Abdou Youssef, Shmuel Rotenstreich, Rahul Simha, Jonathon Stanton, Lance Hoffman and Sead Muftic.