by George Wilson «gcwilson@us.ibm.com», IBM Linux Technology Center

Operating system security features are notoriously difficult to explain. Folks who work on security have their own specialized vocabulary, which serves well to communicate concisely with other members of our community. However, it can be difficult to translate concepts into everyday language. Have you ever tried talking about SELinux to those who have never been exposed to MAC? You have to provide a large amount of background material simply to describe what SELinux is, let alone what interesting things can be done with it. The LTC Security Development Team have developed a number of security features over the years. We’ve discussed them on mailing lists, written conference papers, and otherwise communicated our work to other technical folks. However, explaining the relevance of Linux security features to non-geeks remains a difficulty.

To help address the communications gap, the LTC Security Development Team in concert with the Information Development Team have created a customer-level Linux security brochure. In it, we discuss the various capabilities we have helped bring to Linux distros. Please take a look. It is available for download here: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/linux/pdfs/LTC/SecurityTeam.pdf, which BTW is one of the many resources available from the LTC Library here: http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/ltc/whitepapers.html.