Men in Black Security Guides

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 195 words, 6 images, and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.