It is the official policy of the US government that a Common Criteria EAL2 certification (i.e. "demonstrating resistance to penetration attackers with a basic a

It is the official policy of the US government that a Common Criteria EAL2 certification (i.e. "demonstrating resistance to penetration attackers with a basic attack potential" [1]) is adequate for government systems. This would likely correspond to a Class D, the lowest class, under the old Orange Book standard. In contrast, the only protection profile under Common Criteria designed to evaluate a MLS system, SKPP (Separation Kernel Protection Profile) [2], corresponds to a standard beyond EAL6 [3] (i.e. "demonstrating resistance to penetration attackers with a high attack potential"[4]), MLS systems evaluated under the old Orange Book standard correspond to Class B3 or A1. In contrast, until a few years ago, it was official government policy that EAL4 certification (i.e. "demonstrating resistance to penetration attackers with an Enhanced-Basic attack potential"[5]) was adequate for government systems. This likely corresponds to Class C2 under the old Orange Book standard. This standard was chosen in the interest of allowing standard IT commercial vendors, such as Microsoft and Unix vendors, to submit competitive bids because it was deemed economically and technically infeasible for those systems to be retrofitted with adequate security to achieve a higher standard[6]. So, they instead set the standard to a level achievable by standard commercial IT vendors. They have since reduced it to EAL2 because they determined that requiring a EAL4 certification was too onerous, disqualified large vendors such as FireEye, and was unnecessary as the layering of enough EAL2 systems, each like a piece of swiss cheese, would result in systems comparable to EAL4 systems. [1] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CCPART3V3.1R4.pdf https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CCPART3V3... Page 34 [2] https://www.niap-ccevs.org/profile/Info.cfm?PPID=65&id=65 https://www.niap-ccevs.org/profile/Info.cfm?PPID=65&id=65 [3] https://www.niap-ccevs.org/MMO/PP/pp_skpp_hr_v1.03.pdf https://www.niap-ccevs.org/MMO/PP/pp_skpp_hr_v1.03.pdf Page 84 [4] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CCPART3V3.1R4.pdf https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CCPART3V3... Page 42 [5] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CCPART3V3.1R4.pdf https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CCPART3V3... Page 38 [6] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CCPART3V3.1R4.pdf https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CCPART3V3... Page 38