Red Star Linux Adds Secret Watermarks To Files

An anonymous reader writes: ERNW security analyst Florian Grunow says that North Korea's Red Star Linux operating system is tracking users by tagging content with unique hidden tags. He particularizes that files including Word documents and JPEG images connected to but not necessarily executed in Red Star will have a tag introduced into its code that includes a number based on hardware serial numbers. Red Star's development team seems to have created some quite interesting custom additions to Linux kernel and userspace, based on which Grunow has written a technical analysis.

Comments

Re:"privacy of North Koreans"

[Archangel Michael]

Yeah, I can see it now. NSA Linux, "Freedom Edition with Proprietary Patriot Act Protection!"

And a Obama working with Boehner will get it done.

No, it doesn't

[kromozone]

Before: https://i.imgur.com/oOoWssF.pn...
Open in Red Star 3.0: https://i.imgur.com/MiORhD3.jp...
After: https://i.imgur.com/uqAvXC6.pn...

The above uses an MS Word document created in Office 2011.

I've tried jpg, docx created in MS Word, docx from LibreOffice, and numerous other random file formats copied onto my thumb drive - the MD5 remains exactly the same in every case.

English as she is spoke

[jeremyp]

He particularizes

I don't know what makes me sadder: that he used that word or that it apparently is a word.