LynuxWorks and secunet Collaboration Offers High Security Workstation for Multi-level Systems

The two companies have also entered into a collaborative agreement to develop, sell and market this combined product to organizations requiring the highest levels of security on a worldwide basis. This product can be used by government agencies requiring secure separation of multiple networks on a single workstation, and any Enterprise organizations with highly sensitive information that needs to be protected against malicious threats. First demonstration of the product can be seen in the LynuxWorks booth #332 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA, from February 27-March 1.

“We have been closely working with LynuxWorks on migrating our SINA workstation concept to the LynxSecure high security platform,” said Kai Martius, head of secunet's High Security Business Unit. “The latest generation of LynxSecure offers the performance and the flexibility required to run on the latest portable workstation platforms without compromising the highest level of security offered by its separation kernel architecture. It’s the only operating system (OS) platform on x86 worldwide that offers the maturity and reliability to move our SINA workstation product line from a monolithic OS platform to a real MILS architecture. We are proud to present this technology demonstration at the RSA conference.”

LynxSecure makes it possible to securely run multiple SINA sessions at multiple levels of security on a single hardware platform. It does this by isolating applications and networks into separate partitions to prevent dangerous software interactions and to thwart any zero day or unknown cyber attacks. Any communication between the secure partitions is controlled by security policies defined by the system administrator and enforced by LynxSecure.

The SINA Multilevel Workstation from secunet with the LynxSecure 5.0 platform offers a unique solution for secure multi-tenancy on endpoint and thin client devices,” said Robert Day, vice president of Marketing for Enterprise Security at LynuxWorks. This collaboration brings secunet’s expertise in architecting high security products, including sophisticated techniques like formal methods, together with their proven high security SINA workstation technology to benefit and protect our worldwide customers.

The SINA technology from secunet is the only IP-based crypto-system approved by the German Federal Office for Information Security up to the highest national security level of STRENG GEHEIM (TOP SECRET) for processing and transmission of classified documents. SINA is particularly suitable for customers from the public sector. As a security partner of the German government, secunet is familiar with the requirements of their customers in the public sector and continuously align their SINA products with these requirements.

The combination of the secunet SINA technology and LynuxWorks LynxSecure separation kernel architecture and methodology gives an interactive high-security multilevel workstation which is able to concurrently handle multiple, strictly separated sessions. The user can securely access multiple, differently classified networks from within a single system with the separation of those networks maintained at all times. As different networks are not necessarily under control of one single organization, the workstation design involves a concept to distribute responsibility. As a result, each session can be managed by a different organization independently. A secure graphical user interface (GUI) ensures an unambiguous correlation of user interaction to one well-defined session.