Los Alamos Replaces sudo with PowerBroker for Servers

In the fall of 2006, Los Alamos National Laboratory was tasked with performing an audit of their cyber security systems, including inspections of its safeguards and security functions. The audit aimed to ensure that the organization had a system in place that complied with federal regulations, including the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA). The lab was using sudo, an open source software program that only tracked activity on a machine-by-machine basis. However, the audit revealed inefficiencies associated with using sudo for these purposes. IT administrators were spending an excessive amount of time managing every machine individually to extract and consolidate relevant information from various logs to illustrate compliance and ability to monitor and control privileged users’ activity. Around the same time, the lab learned that it would be inheriting the responsibility of administering about 200 additional UNIX and Linux systems. The staff agreed that it would be impossible to manage this complex heterogeneous environment using the current monolithic architecture of open source sudo.

Los Alamos National Laboratory (www.lanl.gov), located in Los Alamos, N.M., is a premier national security research institution, delivering scientific and engineering solutions for the nation’s most crucial and complex problems. The lab’s primary responsibility is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. In addition to being one of the largest multi-disciplinary institutions in the world, Los Alamos is also the second largest institution and employer in northern New Mexico, with more than 11,000 employees and contractors.