West Point War Gamers Win Big With Linux

Last week's New York Times covered a recent war gaming session at West Point. These war games, however, involved a very different set of weapons.

The Army forces were under attack. Communications were down, and the chain of command was broken.

Pacing a makeshift bunker whose entrance was camouflaged with netting, the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”

These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The N.S.A. made the cadets’ task more difficult by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on millions of computers around the world.

Scroll down almost to the end of the article, and you'll find a crucial bit of information that puts the cadets' exercise in a very different light. It turns out their choice of operating system was entirely up to them:

Brian McCord, part of the team that installed the operating system, said he was chosen because his senior project was deeply reliant on Linux. The West Point team used this open-source operating system, freely available on the Internet, instead of relying on proprietary products from big-name companies like Microsoft or Sun Microsystems.

“It seems weird for the Army with its large contracts to be using Linux, but it’s very cheap and very customizable,” Cadet McCord said. It is also much easier to secure because “you can tweak it for everything you need” and there are not as many known ways to attack it, he said.

I'm not sure how Sun got lumped in with Microsoft as a purveyor of a "proprietary" operating system. Sun's OpenSolaris, unlike Windows, is free to use, modify, and redistribute under an OSI-approved Open Source license.

More to the point, the West Point team had a lot riding on its choice of operating system. They faced NSA-trained attackers who have probably forgotten more dirty tricks than most hackers will ever learn. And it's safe to assume that the cadets weren't just trying to save a few bucks on a Windows Server license.

Complain all you want that Linux is over-hyped or that it doesn't offer any real-world security advantages over Windows. The West Point exercise was about as "real world" as IT security ever gets. And the results speak louder than any marketing campaign ever could.