Sun Microsystems today announced that it will collaborate with Dartmouth College's Department of Computer Science to contribute security features to the OpenSolaris project. In addition, Dartmouth will develop an OpenSolaris-based Operating System (OS) course in its graduate-level computer science curriculum and experts in Dartmouth's Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Laboratory will work to develop a Certificate Authority that can be delivered through the OpenSolaris OS development process, and they will explore integration of OpenSolaris OS with trusted computing technology. "Dartmouth College is an academic leader in both PKI and trusted computing," says Sean Smith, an assistant professor of computer science and the director of the PKI Laboratory. "Furthermore, Dartmouth has a long-standing tradition of trying technology in the real world, not just in the laboratory. All of these things make this an ideal collaboration with Sun Microsystems." This partnership will strengthen the already available Solaris Cryptographic Framework library and will solidify Sun's leadership in the security arena. The Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) already provides more than 80% of the security features previously only found in Sun's Trusted Solaris OS. With Solaris 10 OS, organizations can securely host thousands of applications and multiple customers on the same system. OpenSolaris is an open source project that makes the source code for Solaris 10 OS -- the most advanced operating system on the planet -- available to everyone, so they can innovate, research, teach and build products. Future versions of the Solaris OS will be based on technology from the OpenSolaris project, available at its Web site. "Dartmouth has taken an active role in the OpenSolaris project from the very beginning," said Glenn Weinberg, Vice President of Operating Platforms at Sun and a 1978 graduate of Dartmouth. "This is another significant step in the expanding relationship between Sun and Dartmouth and demonstrates the attractiveness of OpenSolaris as a research and teaching platform for universities." Dartmouth is a member of Sun's Java Center of Excellence Program, a worldwide network of development and testing sites in areas of high performance computing, computational biology, digital libraries and e-learning.