Sun Microsystems Inc. will continue to offer the Trusted Solaris version of its operating system as a separate product, a company official said Tuesday, trying to clear up any confusion that Sun may have caused in the marketplace.
Sun executives have said several times recently that security features from Trusted Solaris, a hardened version of Sun"s OS used by the military, governments and some enterprises, will be added to its standard Solaris distribution. But the two product lines will continue to exist separately, said Ravi Iyer, Sun"s group manager of systems security marketing.
"There"s a misperception that these two products have merged. They have not merged, but we took some features from Trusted Solaris and moved them to Solaris," he said.
For example, Solaris includes a feature from Trusted Solaris called process rights management, which prevents applications from accessing resources that aren"t essential to the task they perform. The feature can help minimize damage caused by buffer overflows, a common type of attack against computers, according to Sun.