Wind River (News - Alert), a provider of embedded and mobile software, announced the availability and security certification of Wind River Linux Secure, which has become the first commercial embedded Linux platform to achieve Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+).

The EAL4+ certification was awarded by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) using the General Purpose Operating System Protection Profile (GP-OSPP).

Wind River Linux Secure joins Wind River’s broad portfolio of safe and secure software platforms, including Wind River VxWorks MILS, Wind River VxWorks 653 Platform and Wind River VxWorks Cert Platform.

As security mandates and tighter regulations expand into broader market segments, there is also an increasing need for security-certified embedded Linux platforms in networking infrastructure, industrial, energy and medical systems.

Wind River Linux Secure is designed for organizations, which require strict security and cryptography certification requirements, such as EAL4+ and FIPS 140-2. The solution provides them with a secure, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) embedded Linux solution. Companies can build secure platforms for military communications, such as software-defined radios, command/control ground stations, and combat systems, as well as Linux-based secure mobile operating systems.

“Wind River is filling a growing critical need in the markets where embedded Linux with security is becoming a requirement and, equally important, where our customers want to create competitive security-based differentiation in their product offerings,” said Paul Anderson, vice president of marketing and strategy for Linux products at Wind River, in a statement.

“Now organizations can meet their security needs with an open architecture software platform designed to comply with national security criteria, based upon a mature and widely-used Linux distribution,” Anderson added.

Wind River Linux Secure has passed Common Criteria EAL4+ certification on ARM including hardware from Texas Instruments, Intel (News - Alert) and Power architectures, enabling organizations to quickly jumpstart projects on a wide range of processor platforms.

“Organizations looking to extend this security certification to their own hardware and software environments can now efficiently create incremental certifications of Wind River Linux Secure on new COTS or custom hardware and applications, significantly decreasing the time, cost and risk of certifying new products,” company officials stated.

The solution features a comprehensive security policy, identification and authentication, system auditing, access control mechanisms, cryptographic services and memory protection. Additional multilevel and multi-category security is offered through National Security Agency (News - Alert) (NSA)-developed Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and several Linux system recovery tools.

Wind River partnered with atsec information security as the Common Criteria Test Lab (CCTL) to conduct the independent evaluation of Wind River Linux Secure.

Earlier this year, Wind River announced the updated version of its Wind River Platform for Android and Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing for Android (News - Alert), TMCnet reported.