Red Hat Finishes Opening Certificate System Code

Published: March 25, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat bought a bunch of Netscape server code from TimeWarner's AOL unit in October 2004 for $23.5 million, and soon thereafter, the software was relaunched as the Red Hat Certificate System. After more than three years, Certificate System is finally fully open sourced.

The Certificate System, you will recall, was comprised of an Apache Web server, the Netscape Directory Server, and the Netscape Certificate Management Server (including the Netscape FIPS140-2 cryptographic libraries. This code is now completely open source and is being made available through the freeIPA project, which is a development release that includes Fedora Linux, the Fedora Directory Server (the developmental version of the Netscape code), as well as Kerberos, NTP, DNS, and Web server tools. The Certificate System side of the Netscape code is now known as Project Dogtag.

As with other open source development projects, Red Hat is banking on external developers and other interested parties to contribute to the shaping and coding of the code behind freeIPA and Project Dogtag. The freeIPA project is keen on providing security for Linux and Unix over the long haul, and with the Dogtag code being open source, other Linux distros will probably take a look at it, and maybe even the OpenSolaris project. Both Novell and Sun Microsystems have made big investments in security and access management, so it seems unlikely that they will drop what they are doing and adopt the Certificate System code for their respective SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Solaris Unix platforms.

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