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Hi,
It was suggested to me that I write this list about backporting
something to gentoo from Tin Hat which is a distro derived from
hardened gentoo.
First a bit of history: Last year a group of us decided to put
together a linux distribution which aimed at the ideal that physical
access to a box (at least when powered down) meant the attacker could
get *no* information whatsover about the running system. (We
concerned ourselves with issues like hard drive encryption hides the
data, but some implementations like cryptsetup put down a header which
would reveal to the attacker that there plausibly *is* encrypted data
present. So we chose implementations in which the attacker would not
be able to tell if he/she were looking at an encrypted drive or just
random bits. Real toil foil hat stuff.) We also wanted a system that
would be useful as a desktop and secure from all the usual suspects
when running.
We decided to use hardened gentoo as a base, but had to branch because
1) we had to restrict the choice of profile/USE flags, 2) we had to do
unspeakably nasty things to the kernel, like compiling it
monolithically for a wide range of hardware, 3) we had to build our
own customized busybox, initramfs image and boot scripts up to
/sbin/init and 4) we put the entire OS in RAM. Literally *everything*
is done in RAM in tmpfs: updates pulled down with portage, compiling
kernels, building ISO images for releases, etc, all done purely in
RAM. Just using Tin Hat requires 4GB of RAM, while
developing/building new releases requires 6GB-8GB. These number are
no longer out of the range of reasonably priced computers.
Point 4 is what I think would be useful to Gentoo mainstream. The
speed one gets from RAM totally beats a LiveCD using unionfs which has
to periodically return to the slow cdrom. I've tried building custom
LiveCDs for courses that I've taught but the students (=users) hated
them. In contrast I am now teaching an embedded systems course and I
put all the needed utilities (eg. crosscompilers, qemu, etc) into a
"ramified" system which the students love because of the speed. So I
think many Gentoo users might like this feature and we could
simultaneously develop the scripts for both Gentoo and its derivative
Tin Hat.
We have written a series of scripts to "ramify" a system. There are
two versions: A) take an OS bound to the hard drive and build an ISO
image which will boot and put the system totally into tmpfs, B) take a
system which is already "ramified" and build an ISO which will again
boot purely into RAM, ie build a snapshot. A user could use scprits
A to ramify a custom built system and maintain it in ram with scripts
B. Also, Gentoo "releases" could be distributed already ramified.
To port this back, I would have to modify the scripts to deal with a
modular kernel and the way initramfs is built using genkernel. I
would also need to write the ebuild. No problem, but I would like
some feed back from the list regarding whether this is something worth
trying and any advice on how to proceed, eg. should we write our own
portage overlay?
The Tin Hat homepage is at
http://opensource.dyc.edu/tinhat
The repository is at
http://opensource.dyc.edu/pub/TinHat
- --
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
USA
(716) 829-8197
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