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

Like rain on your weeding day

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I suppose it's probably safe to trust that the makers of your LiveCD aren't putting little rootkits into the image that automatically get installed to the existing OS image on the hard disk.

LiveCDs are great, but always make sure that the source is trustworthy or you may end up with a bootable CD with Tubgirl as the desktop background. That wouldn't be pleasant. Especially in front of a customer.

Atleast in Kanotix

[poeidon1]

it lacked ndiswrapper kernel module though it had ndiswrapper installed. Made it impossible to use it with my wireless network. If it ships with ndiis wrapper it should have had ndiswrapper module or atleast some source where it could be compiled.

No BSD?

[putko]

What about that OpenBSD-based live CD? Isn't that a top security OS?

Or is this thing only for Linux?

Re:No BSD?

[Professor_UNIX]

What about that OpenBSD-based live CD? Isn't that a top security OS?

OpenBSD is a strong server operating system but it makes a horrible forensics toolkit base because of the lack of the level of hardware support that Linux enjoys. I'm not bashing it as a server OS since you can pick and choose the best supported components in that environment, but when using it as a forensics tool you have to support a wide variety of very oddball hardware that a desktop or server might contain and Linux is better at doing that.

How about "Live USB Key" distros?

[timeOday]

Anybody know a distro that's easy to install and run from a USB key?

I've found instructions on doing this for some distros (including Knoppix I think), but the step-by-step was too long and involved.

Re:How about "Live USB Key" distros?

[korbin_dallas]

Damn Small Linux.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Its pretty easy, but its very difficult to separate the 'old' docs from the 'new' info about some sections of the system.

Make a cdrom, boot a box off that, then from the menus, choose to create a bootable usb OR a usb that can be started from within Windows or Linux as a guest OS.

BUT:
Of the many hundreds of computers here I have not found one that would in fact boot from USB!

Running as a Guest OS inside of Windows doesn't provide any Network Access. Now Qemu site says its possible, but its not obvious how to configure such a thing.

Adding your own stuff. It is very difficult, for some reason, to package your own stuff for use with DSL(mostly lack of clear docs). We have our own programs we want to add, so I have to figure this out myself.

Re:Insert Linux

[permaculture]

I really want to boot from a USB pen drive. The file downloaded OK and the CD booted OK.
Rightclick desktop and choose "Applications, INSERT, usb-install"
Now a confusing choice, which device: hdx/sdx/ubx?

UBX -> "Error creating EXT2 filesystem"
SDX -> seems to have overwritten my hard drive (no matter, it's a test PC)
HDX -> leave this for later

I think this PC has: sdc, sda1, sda5, sdb1, and sdc - might it be one of those?

Or can you help me use fdisk to check my USB device name? I managed to get a CLI and type "fdisk" in, but there's syntax to puzzle over. I tried a few things but nothing really got anywhere.

Many thanks :)