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Secure, Portable, Virtual Privacy Machine

Posted by michael on from the zero-knowledge-tried-and-failed dept.

solcity writes "Looks like an online privacy company, Metropipe, are planning to release a secure linux virtual privacy machine that runs from a USB stick. The image contains a pre-release of their new 'Metropipe Tunneler' product and also contains Firefox, and Thunderbird with the Enigmail/gpg extension. Looks like the whole thing is based on damnsmalllinux and uses qemu to boot on Windows or Linux without any installation or configuration. Very interesting use of qemu and damnsmalllinux, and all 100% GPL."

3 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How big? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The zip is 82MB. Probably want to run this on a 256MB or larger key so you have room to store data as well...

  2. Nope by RealProgrammer · · Score: 5, Informative

    RTFA: it's run on the qemu emulator. You first boot the host OS, and your qemu session is just a process under that, with no more rights than otherwise.

    If you had a boot CD, now that would a problem. Would I let someone boot my laptop from Knoppix? Not unless I would trust them to sysadmin my laptop :-).

    As the above poster says, security accepted wisdom is that physical control implies vulnerability.

    --
    sigs, as if you care.
  3. Re:Not all GPL... by juhaz · · Score: 5, Informative

    The ./ story, as well as the link (Portable Virtual Privacy Machine), say that it's 100% GPL, but at least the Mozilla parts (Firefox and Thunderbird) are under the Netscape Public License.

    Huh? NPL is Gone. Dead. Buried. Mozilla has been (mostly, and the exceptions should be BSD etc. GPL-compatible) LGPL/GPL/MPL tri-licensed for quite a while now, the new licensing policy is over three years old.