The Orange Book

I was spelunking around in Unicode and saw that there’s an emoji for orange book, U+1F4D9.

Orange Book emoji Linux

As is often the case, the emoji renders differently in different contexts. The image above is from my Linux desktop and the image below is from my Macbook. I tried created an image on my Windows box but it didn’t have a glyph for this character.

Orange book emoji Apple

When I saw “orange book” my first thought was the US Department of Defense publication Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC), aka DoDD 5200.28-STD, commonly know in security circles as the Orange Book. For a split second I thought “Is this book so famous that there’s an emoji for it?!” But of course that’s not the case.

There are emoji for several colors of books, and there are several books in the DOD “Rainbow Series” publications. such as the Green Book for password management. (There’s also an emoji for green book: U+1F4D7).

TCSEC

So what is The Orange Book? Here’s a photo of the cover.

Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria

Here’s how Bruce Schneier describes the book in Applied Cryptography.

The NCSC publishes the infamous “Orange Book.” It’s actual title is the Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, but that’s a mouthful to say and the book has an orange cover. The Orange Book attempts to define security requirements, gives computer manufacturers an objective way to measure the security of their systems, and guides them as to what to build into their secure products. It focuses on computer security and doesn’t really say a lot about cryptography.

The Orange Book is now deprecated in favor of The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation, ISO/IEC 15408.

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