Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and services for customers with high security requirements, today announced (PDF) the availability of Tresys VM Fortress, a patent-pending secure desktop virtualization technology for organizations seeking strong security and operational integrity. VM Fortress (not to be confused with vFortress, a company recently acquired by Propalms), aims to give organizations with high-end security needs the ability to utilize desktop virtualization without compromising protection by strengthening the guest operations system and the virtualization software itself to withstand the most threatening of compromises. According to the press release, VM Fortress benefits and market differentiators include:

• Strong Endpoint Security: Providing strong, independent control over system resources by leveraging the flexible mandatory access control (MAC) features provided by Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to limit damage caused by exploitable vulnerabilities in virtual machines
• Decreased Operational Costs: Removing the barrier of entry to desktop consolidation where security assurance is a high priority; leveraging stronger MAC security reduces the damage and costs to desktop environments should they become attacked
• Increased Data Confidentiality & Integrity: Providing separation for the user and the application on a per VM basis, ensuring that data is not leaked across VMs and that applications cannot interfere with each other while sharing the same hardware resources
• Increased Operational Integrity: Limiting the effects of attacks and errors, so that vulnerabilities in one VM cannot be exploited to gain access to other VMs or to the host operating system
• Ease of Management/Deployment: Systems can be deployed over the network from a central installation server and VMs can be remotely downloaded on demand by the user