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Ned Ludd wrote: |
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> On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 08:24 -0400, dante wrote: |
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> |
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>> Hi everyone, |
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>> |
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>> My students and I have started a new gnome-based desktop linux distro |
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>> derived from hardened Gentoo. It may be of interest to people on this |
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>> list. |
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>> |
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>> Tin Hat is pretty much Gentoo, but it runs purely in RAM. It boots from |
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>> CD or pen drive, but is not a liveCD in that it doesn't mount a file |
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>> system from the boot device. Rather it copies its squashfs from CD to |
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>> tmpfs in RAM. Booting is slow, it requres 4 GB of RAM or more, but it |
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>> is lightening fast once up. ("emerge --sync" takes about a minute |
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>> between a Tin Hat system offering portage, and one sync-ing from |
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>> scratch. Firefox starts in about 1 second.) |
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>> |
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>> Tin Hat was started before the recent coldboot attacks. Within the |
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>> limit of such attacks, Tin Hat aims at "zero information loss" if |
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>> physical access is obtained to a system which is powered down. We add |
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>> Ruusu's loop-aes patch to the kernel so that any hard drives are mounted |
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>> using one of the best implimentations of block cipher encryptions we |
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>> know of. During power up, Tin Hat uses GRSEC/PaX hardening to hedge |
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>> against all the usual attacks. We are now thinking about our own patch |
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>> to obfuscate data in RAM to protect against coldboot --- but to be |
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>> honest, we think we can only make it harder, not impossible. |
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>> |
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>> Tin Hat is stable. We run 6 systems persistently on clean power and |
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>> have typical up times of a couple of months. |
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>> |
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>> We never intended on releasing Tin Hat, but the students love it so much |
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>> (the speed!) we thought of announcing it on freshmeat. I thought I'd |
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>> post to this list because of it is a successful implementation of |
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>> hardened Gentoo. |
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>> |
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>> Home page: http://opensource.dyc.edu/tinhat |
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>> Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/tinhat |
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>> |
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> |
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> |
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> I absolutely love seeing others create things with hardened. |
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> |
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> Feel free to keep this list apprised of regular updates. |
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> |
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> |
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Thanks Ned. When there are more updates, I'll post. And, thanks to |
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whoever mentioned the project to Josh Saddler. He says he wants to |
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mention the project in the next Gentoo Monthly Newsletter. |
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|
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I'm very indebted to hardened gentoo. I use it for any project where I |
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need an operating system environment. Eg, another project on that web |
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site (tor-ramdisk) uses a micro hardened gentoo uclibc-based |
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environment. The entire portage system of gentoo let's me build it as I |
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need it, and hardened-gentoo brings in all those extra security |
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features. So, I teach about gentoo in my modern operating systems |
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course and I use hardened gentoo to teach kernel hardening in my |
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security course. The team's work is appreciated. |
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|
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Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D. |
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Chair of Information Technology |
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D'Youville College |
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Buffalo NY 14201 |
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USA |
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|
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(716) 829-8197 |
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