[ISN] NSA Winds Down Secure Virtualization Platform Development

http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229219339

By J. Nicholas Hoover 
InformationWeek
February 24, 2011

After several years in the making and two releases, the National 
Security Agency is winding down new development of its secure client 
virtualization framework, the High Assurance Platform (HAP).

At HAP's inception, NSA wanted an integrated, networked framework of 
virtualization and security technology, but the market had yet to 
deliver one. So NSA set out to piece together the disparate hardware and 
software that commercial vendors had already placed on the market. "We 
saw all of these things," Neil Kittleson, the commercial solutions 
center's trusted computing portfolio manager, said in an interview. "And 
we saw the need to create custom policy around it to get them all to 
work in parallel."

Historically, intelligence agencies have used different computers for 
working with differing levels of classified data, but HAP allows 
multiple security levels -- from unclassified to top secret -- to 
operate on the same machine. HAP is managed by NSA's commercial 
solutions center, a group focused on engaging industry. The intent of 
the six-year-old program was to leverage purely commercial technologies, 
rather than relying on custom code and products designed specifically 
for government, as was long the norm for the intelligence community.

The HAP program was intended to push both NSA's tech boundaries and the 
industry's own virtualization and security offerings. This close work 
with vendors is central to the commercial solutions center's broader 
mission. For example, the office has an outreach element that has 
vendors come in and talk about emerging capabilities. "We want to know 
where they're going, understand that, and help influence development," 
Mike Lamont, chief of the NSA's network solutions office, said in an 
interview. Vendors of products being used in the HAP project include 
IBM, VMware, Wave Systems, and others.

[...]


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