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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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkmEbHoACgkQl5yvQNBFVTW61wCdFZHuxi8dtNCOfQh7VEYwv1q8 /zkAoKbanGQaCC6X1Nm7xKnSuNKUmXvw =k0KG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----