[TUHS] Government-Issue UNIX?

[Rik Farrow via TUHS]

Speaking of the AT&T Orange Book, B level Unix system, I had some minor
involvement with it from the system administration side of things. A secure
US facility in the San Jose area known as the Blue Cube had sent a couple
of servicemen to a class in security I was teaching. They shared a manual
for managing the security aspects of the system: 123 commands just for
managing security. That seemed totally unreasonable to me, in that most
people had a difficult enough time managing ordinary Unix systems, where a
sysadmin needed to know just a relative two handfuls of commands to be
effective.

I wonder how well KSOS was designed, or if it also included over 100 new
commands for managing mandatory security?

Rik


On Thu, Oct 9, 2025 at 4:58 AM Douglas McIlroy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> When Jim Reeds and I were making the IX multilevel-secure Unix
> (1987-88), an Orange-Book-compliant Unix was being made for the
> government at BTL's Whippany Lab. There was some communication between
> the two projects, but different objectives led to significantly
> different systems.
>
> Did the Whippany product become KSOS, or did DOD end up with two
> "secure" Unixes?
>
> Doug
>