Tinfoil Hat Linux: A Distribution for the Paranoid

An Anonymous Coward writes: " Tinfoil Hat Linux is a distribution designed to allow the signing and encrypting of documents with the utmost in security. The floppy-image has numerous security features including: entering your passphrase via a video game style selection process to combat hardware keystroke loggers, turning the contrast of your screen down to foil prying eyes and cameras, and to run background PGP processes."

Comments

Re:Hoax

[MaxVlast]

Seems legit to me.

Actually, a floppy-based distro that can be used for really secure work is a great idea. I can keep a trusted environemnt with me at all times, and know what's going on (I never trust another person's computer when sitting down at it. I know how my machine is set up which gives me no cause to trust others!)

You need instructions?

[Chris Burke]

Just surround your computer with a cage made of chicken wire.

The problem is that as soon as you have to connect to the world outside (like through a network cable... or a power cord) you break the cage, and you've pretty much defeated the whole purpose.

And don't tell me about the incredibly tiny radiation leakage from your monitor carried by the power cord! The Illuminati can still read it!

Coka? Cola?

[Graymalkin]

So..does it come with TEMPEST-proof console fonts too? I think that would be the big todo for the really paranoid (aside from coming with a foldout F cage). Highly anti-aliased fonts work decently (in theory) thrwarting VE screen captures but if you're running soley in the console I would think you're at a decent risk of having your data captured considering the regularity of the screen and the unique shaping of console fonts. A little off topic but I was wondering if one could impliment a Matrix style command shell where white space was replaced on screen from /dev/rand in a light font like light grey and then when you type the letters would either be dark grey or white to distinguish them from the random letter replacing white space. While somewhat hard to read it would cause so much static VE screen captures which of crappy monitors can be done with a slightly hacked AM radio, would be pretty difficult to make out. It would just be cool to make a shell that just did that to begin with. Pop open a terminal and have it look super funky would make a pretty badass shell theme.

White glove Linux

[ajaygautam]

White Glove Linux is another similar distro. Ajay

Re:Hoax

[HCase]

I think people managed to miss the humor in your claiming the "tin hat" story to be a hoax.... i laughed though. For anyone confused, the writer of the post most likely had to rest his own tin hat to write it. didncha?

Bootable cdroms

[rangerx]

Instead of a floppy, why not use a cdrom? It can hold alot more, has faster load times, and many other features.
PLAC - Portable Linux Auditing CD

LNX-BBC

LBT

Tempest fonts

[morcheeba]

A nice addition would be tempest-resistant fonts! Here's a great article on tempest about tempest & creating fonts that are unreadable. Basically, the tempest setup only picks up the upper 30% of the frequency range, so this font has those components filtered out. But, the cool thing is that you can superimpose a (low amplitude) high-frequency pattern that isn't very visible to the user, but is visible to the tempest receiver. A whole fake Win98 screen transmitted? Here's the slide presentation for the above article (if you just want to look at the pretty pictures)

Re:http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

[GGardner]

What about the compilers? Are you sure they aren't inserting any funny business into the binary code?

While we're at it, what about the CPU, and other support chips? Have you inspected the VHDL?

Re:http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

[corebreech]

It ain't that I'm stuck. It's only that I don't want to install packages that I'm not prepared to fully understand.

No doubt most of the new stuff available today only needs a ./configure and a make install, and there it is, on your disk.

But in my mind that's no different than installing using somebody else's distribution.

I should fess up and say that I don't always use my installation, but that's mostly because my paycheck demands I use other code.

That doesn't change my lust for a system I can understand, down to the statement, and one that I have complete control over. I'm sure that a lot of you who've been with Linux forever you've acquired a sense for this a long time ago; I'm kind of new to the OS though, I've only been using it for a couple of years.

It's biggest attraction for me is that I get to be anal about learning it. Taking it one step at a time, and leaving nothing to chance.

So what if I don't have windows! Most everything I end up doing on the Mac or on Windows is all text-based anyways. Look at the interface for Visual C or Codewarrior on the Mac and tell me exactly what I'm missing when using something like EMACS on a screen that has a resolution of over 200 characters across.

Pretty colors? Alpha-blending? Anti-aliased fonts? It's all shit! It makes everything go slower, while making me put my nose up to the monitor so I can see what the fuck is going on!

Why do I need that?

Re:http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

[Lionel Hutts]

Absolutely. For those who haven't read it, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" is Ken Thompson's story of the greatest hack of all time: changing a compiler so that it not only created a backdoor whenever compiling login.c, but so that the modification persisted when the modified compiler was applied to the source of a standard C compiler. There's just no easy way to do without trusting anyone at all.