10 Best Security Live CD Distros

Ant writes to tell us Darknet has a summary of the ten best LiveCD distributions dealing with security. With links to download and a little information about each one." An great overview of some handy tools, some you know and probably a few you don't.

Comments

Re:Like rain on your weeding day

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good reason never to test something while customers are present...

Re:Pros & Cons of Live CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

^ posted as AC for security in shameless plugging.

Re:No BSD?

[Ratbert42]

Top secure OS, not top hacker OS.

Re:Like rain on your weeding day

[MooUK]

Anyone using something like this for the first time in the presence of a customer should have bigger problems than just tubgirl...

Just throwing security apps on a livecd distro

[walterbyrd]

Is not all that impressive to me.

Also, it seems to me that a rescue CD should not, by default, boot to a GUI. It slows down the boot, and is not that useful when GUI can not be loaded. People who use these should know how to use the command line.

RO-OS

[Doc Ruby]

One of the best features of a secure Live CD is that the read-only media prevents attacks from writing to the stored OS (on CD). I'd love to see a virtualization system that reloads the OS from the CD every so often (hours, minutes, seconds) and switches all processes to the new, more trustworthy instance.

Maybe a safer system will just reload a single watchdog instance from the CD, which checks itself against the other running instances.

Any difference would send an alarm out of the system.

Of course, the virtualization layer itself needs authenticity checks. But that might be possible against a CD image, and in any case would be no less secure than without this system I'm describing.