Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 receives EAL4+ certification

Red Hat has announced that version 6 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution has been awarded Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+) certification in accordance with the Common Criteria standard (ISO-IEC 15408). The company received the certification for the Operating System Protection Profile (OSPP) including the Advanced Management, Advanced Audit, Labeled Security and Virtualisation extended modules. On various x86 64-bit Intel and AMD64-based hardware from Dell, HP, IBM and SGI, the certification includes virtualisation support using the KVM hypervisor. RHEL6 is also certified without virtualisation on the same systems, on IBM systems with Power7 processors and on IBM System Z mainframes where KVM does not operate.

The Common Criteria EAL4+ certification is the highest level of assurance that a standard commercial operating system can achieve without special modifications. The internationally recognised set of standards are especially important to government agencies, financial institutions and other organisations as they is used to assess the security of a product before rolling them out in sensitive environments. Version 6 of RHEL was certified by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

RHEL 5 received its EAL4+ certification in June 2007, while RHEL 4 was awarded it in early 2006.