Applause for an half EAL 4+ evaluation of Red Hat 5

Nice, after many years Linux is en par with Trusted Solaris regaring the evaluated protection profiles. IBM sponsored the evaluation. But wait, is Linux really en par. You should look on the bottom of page 16 of the Evaluation report:

While the TOE distribution media includes a Graphical User Interface (GUI), it is not installed by default, is not part of the Evaluated Configuration and was not evaluated

Well … come back, when you have an trusted and certified desktop … at least when you want to pretent, that you have an certified Client. Evaluating Red Hat Enterprise Client without GUI is like the early certifcation of Windows on the assumption that it´s not connected to a network ;) Certification are like benchmarks. Read the full disclosures before drawing any conclusions.