Gentoo Archives: gentoo-hardened

From: Paige Thompson <erratic@×××××.ws>
To: gentoo-hardened@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-hardened] Tin Hat = hardened Gentoo distro in RAM
Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:03:15
Message-Id: 5061b39c0808012203y1c7e4106i7bfeff2202fdb056@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-hardened] Tin Hat = hardened Gentoo distro in RAM by dante
1 yeah actually I am, I'm also interested in seeing things like
2 samba/ldap/kerberos and selinux modules work the same way as group policy
3 objects and administrative templates work.
4
5
6
7 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 5:24 AM, dante <dante@×××××××××××××××.net> wrote:
8
9 > Hi everyone,
10 >
11 > My students and I have started a new gnome-based desktop linux distro
12 > derived from hardened Gentoo. It may be of interest to people on this
13 > list.
14 >
15 > Tin Hat is pretty much Gentoo, but it runs purely in RAM. It boots from
16 > CD or pen drive, but is not a liveCD in that it doesn't mount a file
17 > system from the boot device. Rather it copies its squashfs from CD to
18 > tmpfs in RAM. Booting is slow, it requres 4 GB of RAM or more, but it
19 > is lightening fast once up. ("emerge --sync" takes about a minute
20 > between a Tin Hat system offering portage, and one sync-ing from
21 > scratch. Firefox starts in about 1 second.)
22 >
23 > Tin Hat was started before the recent coldboot attacks. Within the
24 > limit of such attacks, Tin Hat aims at "zero information loss" if
25 > physical access is obtained to a system which is powered down. We add
26 > Ruusu's loop-aes patch to the kernel so that any hard drives are mounted
27 > using one of the best implimentations of block cipher encryptions we
28 > know of. During power up, Tin Hat uses GRSEC/PaX hardening to hedge
29 > against all the usual attacks. We are now thinking about our own patch
30 > to obfuscate data in RAM to protect against coldboot --- but to be
31 > honest, we think we can only make it harder, not impossible.
32 >
33 > Tin Hat is stable. We run 6 systems persistently on clean power and
34 > have typical up times of a couple of months.
35 >
36 > We never intended on releasing Tin Hat, but the students love it so much
37 > (the speed!) we thought of announcing it on freshmeat. I thought I'd
38 > post to this list because of it is a successful implementation of
39 > hardened Gentoo.
40 >
41 > Home page: http://opensource.dyc.edu/tinhat
42 > Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/tinhat
43 >
44 > Anthony G. Basile
45 > Chair of Information Technology
46 > D'Youville College
47 > Buffalo NY 14201
48 >
49 > (716) 829-8197
50 >
51 >
52 >
53 >
54 >