NSA Operating System Guides

The National Security Agency offers Operating System Guides on their websites. These guides are currently being used throughout the government and by numerous entities as a security baseline their systems.

The Operating Systems include Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Mac OS X among others. The guides are available in pdf and zip format. All guides include for instance account policy settings, file system security and security configuration and analysis.

You can access a list of guides on this page. Please note that search results list more than 49,000 search results for security guides. Some guides are still accessible while other search results lead to pages that are no longer available at their original web address. It is not clear if the NSA has moved those guides to a new destination or removed the guides from the web.

Here is a link to a page that is still working:

Operating Systems – A page that lists guides for various operating systems, including Windows 7, Windows Vista, Apple Mac OSX or Linux. Topics discussed include security highlights, security compliance management or application whitelisting.

Links with download file sizes displayed usually work, while others that do not show download sizes often do not.

I’d recommend to use the search form on the site to find links for your operating system. You can use the advanced search options on the left to include and exclude phrases in the search. You can also filter by title only which drops the result count considerably.

Please note that you may still get links displayed to pages that are no longer hosted on the NSA website. The majority of guides seem to be rather outdated though.

Another page of interest is the published papers and technical reports page, that concentrates on the security enhanced Linux version that the NSA has developed and released.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Saturday October 29, 2005 -
Tags:nsa, Operating Systems, privacy, Security