Addamax Inc, the Champaign, Illinois company whose security system was rejected by the Open Software Foundation for inclusion in the OSF/1 operating system, has been formally accepted by the US Defense Intelligence Agency as a participant in the US government’s official evaluation of secure Compartmented Mode Workstations. Addamax is the only company seeking a B1 security rating from the US government with a System V/386 Compartmented Mode implementation. The Defense Agency, which is supposed to be underwriting some of the development costs, originally selected five companies to come up with an answer: IBM with the RS/6000, DEC on the VAX, Sun Microsystems on the Sparcstation, Secureware on an Apple Computer Macintosh II and Harris on an 80386 machine. Several months ago Addamax, a co-developer on the Harris project since 1989, took over the Harris development contract, effectively buying Harris’ slot in the evaluation procedure, a situation the Agency has now sanctioned. According to its president, Addamax’s Compartmented Mode Workstation is currently in design analysis, the second of a three-phase evaluation procedure, and awaits a decision in the third quarter. Addamax has delivered 14 beta versions of its technology to various sites and received its first production order, valued at $600,000, late last month. Although the software should run on almost any properly configured 80386 or 80486 workstation, Addamax expects both Tempest and non-Tempest 80386 configurations from Zenith, Delta Data, Unisys, Datawatch and Wang to be among the first formally approved by the government.
