[shubb]

Summary -

The US navy wants to use (near) commercial android devices. These might be used to display confidential reports (as in a normal buisness), but may also be used to control the ship.

The navy already have secure versions of Linux and Windows, and want something similar for android.

This will take the form of additional security layers, similar to the ones the NSA did for Linux[1].

Some of them will be made commercially available, hopefully increasing security to the whole platform. If this included e.g. application sandboxing, you can see that it would be of general interest, particularly to people with similar needs (Android based control terminal for a power station, or sys admin wants to roll out policy to coorp devices).

Android is becoming the default embedded OS for a lot of UI, so it's really nice to see this.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

[jlgreco]

Hmm, who actually is the one to usually do this sort of thing?

Clearly it is a good idea, but I don't think it really makes sense for the Navy to do it for themselves. Isn't this more the sort of thing the NSA should be doing on the behalf of everyone else in government?

[hallowtech]

I think the Naval Research Laboratory is more than capable.

http://www.nrl.navy.mil

[mpyne]

NSA handles crypto, certainly (though even that is being pushed ahead by NIST), but the Navy already has been developing software (or overseeing its development) for decades.

They named a ship after Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, after all, and even today their Virginia-class SSNs already use Linux in some areas.

[justincormack]

Perhaps even the same. Android is pretty much Linux and converging fast. They can probably reuse a lot.