Where might one go for advanced security techniques? Regardless of where on the planet you may be - if you think about it for a while the United States Government’s National Security Agency will pop up on that list somewhere.

These are the folks who brought us the excellent Security Enhanced Linux — a promising construction of the Linux kernel for ‘hardened’ protection and administration.

I was pointed to a new security configuration guide released on October 15th for tweaking OS X (Panther) — showing deeper penetration by Apple beyond the research tiers in the public sector, where they have a stronghold, into more mainstream usage areas.

While there I discovered an entire library of documents covering new and legacy platforms and applications relevant to the web professional, including:

• A brief on network security, and router guidelines
• Java plug-in security
• IIS 5.0 recommendations
• Techniques for securing Microsoft SQL and Oracle database servers
• Client and server configuration guides for Exchange Server 2000 and Outlook
• and much more — free for the taking..

The NSA’s site has great depth and is fairly easy to maneuver — there are some interesting research projects and outreach programs to academia, businesses and within the government.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2004 at 11:18 pm, contains 193 words, and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.