Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking

Santa Barbara, Calif. – Following CEO Dan O’Dowd’s talk about the need for a secure network platform, Green Hills Software announced that it is launching a secure network platform.

The Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking (to use its formal name) includes the company’s INTEGRITY real-time operating system, an IPv4/IPv6 networking stack, a file system, IPSec, IKE, a secure Web server that uses SSL/TLS, a SSH client, a RADIUS client, and SNMP. (The software is being officially announced on Wed., Dec. 6th.)

The target market for the GHPfSN (to make up an acronym) is networked devices, such as LAN/WAN infrastructure, media servers/gateways, bank systems, handheld devices, and medical equipment. The company cites recently published buffer-overflow flaws in Cisco’s IOS (the operating system inside its switches and routers) as explaining why GHPfSN is needed.

What makes GHPfSN secure, according to Green Hills, is that INTEGRITY isolates and separates the kernel from applications using protected address spaces for applications, system services, system data, and hardware device drivers. So, for example, the IPv4/IPv6 stack is in its own secure address space, so that even if it’s compromised, it doesn’t provide an entry point into the kernel, and from there into the rest of the device.

Other Green Hills news…

The company has updated its INTEGRITY real-time operating system. Version 10 adds support for symmetric multiprocessing, as well as a real-time debugging agent tied into Green Hills’ EventAnalyzer software. There are also new security features, including a new way of allocating memory resources, and a new device-driver model. INTEGRITY 10 will be available in the first quarter of 2007, according to Green Hills.