Linux Community Magazine

Easy portable security is a LiveCD distribution developed by the Department of Defense to end secure node, in other words, a secure environment from accessing the Web or a remote desktop host function. The focus is on security, and for this reason it is started from a CD and leads from the RAM, deploying a Web browser, a file manager and a few other small tools.

The lightweight portable security distribution has been the software protection initiative under the direction of the air force research laboratory and the U.S. Department of Defense. The idea is that Government employees can use a CD or USB flash drive, to boot type into a tamper-proof, pristine desktop use unsafe computer such as in hotels available or an employee's own home. The surrounding area there should be consistently largely against Internet-borne threats such as viruses and spyware, especially when run from read-only media such as such as a CD-ROM. The LPS system provided the hard drive of the host machine, no trace of the user leaves activities behind.

If it sounds a bit cloak and dagger, consider that anyone who wants to quickly set up a secure setup on a PC of unknown security status could have a use for a distribution like LPS. For example, you can understand, computer security, but the staff of your local library or in a hotel?

The first thing you is welcomed, when you first start from the CD boot screen, the bottom, the area of the respective seals of the Department of Defense, air force research is dominated research laboratory and the anti-tamper-software protection initiative. Very erweise, there is also a note telling you that F2 to startup messages, which brings out mostly a list of loaded Linux kernel modules consist. LPS supports the WiFi interfaces but not the current, support for printers or sound hardware.

Subsequently, you are dumped in a very simple desktop, use the power of IceWM. The layout is the familiar combination of application launcher and task switcher bar at the bottom of the screen. Review of applications shows that this is indeed a very minimal desktop. You are given that can edit Firefox Web browser, a text editor and a file manager, the files in the RAMdisk or a flash drive. There is also a remote desktop client that works with RDP or Citrix hosts and a tool to deal with files, the AES encrypted.

It seems obvious scope for adding applications to get distribution. In fact, the site advises the user contact the development team with feature requests, reasoning that if a person wants it, could also be other people.

Download Firefox, I was a little surprised that it's a pretty currently was stable build and it included the Flash plugin, but I suppose Flash sometime need most Web workers these days. It comes with plugins to change the browser agent string send encrypted mail through Gmail, work with encrypted files and bookmarks to an online server to synchronize.

Conclusion

LPS is obviously a niche distribution. If your needs are specific and need just a basic Web browser and a remote desktop client on a disc or to hand could out with someone, a more complex lost could live-CD, this distribution for you. It offers an interesting insight in how organizations create custom Linux builds niche requirements. The site itself is a whole lot of detail about the reasons behind LPS.

The LPS website.

Writer Michael Reed free http://www.unmusic.co.uk/ technology, retro computing, geek culture and gender politics writes headquartered in the UK. His byline has appeared in several technology publications.

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With New Swiss Host, WikiLeaks Continues to Publish
Dec 4, 2010, 03 :02 UTC (4 Talkback[s]) (2221 reads)
(Other stories by Kenneth Corbin)

"After being effectively booted off the Web by its U.S. domain name system (DNS) provider, the whistleblower website WikiLeaks has managed to reemerge on the Swiss domain, where it continues to publish classified cables detailing the activities of U.S. diplomats around the world.

"EveryDNS.net, a group providing free domain name services, terminated WikiLeaks' service followed what it described as a severe distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

"On Monday, EveryDNS.net informed WikiLeaks that it would terminate its service in 24 hours owing to the attack, which it claimed violated its usage agreement for disrupting other domains that use the service."

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One of the standards which has become common in the U.S. federal sector requiring that all mobile devices such as laptops, drives have encrypted. This was led by personal information in the supposed a direct result of a series of laptop theft earlier in the Decade, leaking. As former Federal contractor, I saw a number of successful and not successful methods implemented and deployed. Some led to real privacy and some led to wonderful bricks. In some cases on a regular basis (daily read).

One of the more successful tools is the trust Platform Module (TPM)-chip. If implemented correctly, you can improve the encryption ensure that even if your disk is removed from your laptop, it is still safe and greatly improved security. So, you imagine my surprise when the private sector, that my new company has no policy for encryption of laptops, even though almost everyone in society has a rejoining.

I was a brand new Dell with a TPM chip and Windows XP on it. Of course, the first thing I did was download a copy of Fedora and set about reformatting the machine, including the establishment of TPM and ext4 install and enable Linux hard disk encryption and went along my cheerful manner, not really thinking about it. That was six months ago.

Like most laptop users if disk space is low, you have two options. Replace the hard drive with a larger and newly install or a larger disk cloning. After only six months I was tired to do a reinstall, so I decided I would go the clone route. But wait I had protected a TMP, encrypted drives. How should was I to do this? This was certainly a routine sort of thing. So I set out to the Internet and did some research. And what I discovered underwhelmed. Essentially, while there are with a number of websites that tell you how you your hard drive (something) to clone, I'm very familiar, there are almost none to speak about the problems of encryption. That left me in a bit of a dilemma.

I finally decided to give it a shot, and hope I could make it work. The first question was, what tool to use. I decided to go with dd, because it not a bit for bit copy, rather than access to the file system need. This is important because the disk for the most part, is encrypted.

The other decision I made, remove the disk from the machine and put it in a cage and the second disk in a cage as well. I then booted the diskless machine with a LiveCD (I used Fedora 14 desktop) and the hard drives. Sure enough have my encrypted hard drive popped up and I have a warning indicating that it was encrypted. I canceled the option my password entering and my second hard drive connected and get to work, to do the copy.

I moved some 150 GB disk from one computer to another via USB. It took close to 10 hours to do this successfully. So while dd, there are probably faster alternatives. Your mileage may vary.

After the copy is successful, I installed the new hard disk, pushed the power button and out my fingers crossed. I am happy to report that fired up, and after a successful password to decrypt the drive itself and I was back in business.

But wait a minute.... Yes, what's with the TPM chip? Keep in mind that a TPM chip to do one of the things that prevent that read from a disk that is me not connected to the system board. I should not only not been able to read I me unable to copy it at all - at least not in some sort of usable form it once mounted in the cage. And I did. Why? Well, that's my leading thought I the module have set up correctly or that Dell has properly it the hard drive to add the additional protection. It is also possible I have installed Linux in a way to use the chip. In both cases while I am getting security through the Linux-based disk encryption, I'm no additional protection from the TPM chip.

These then are the takeaways. You can use dd to successfully copy Linux encrypted drives. And never assume, you are secure unless you test your security. Better yet, have it someone else test. Chances are you are not as secure as you think you are.

These instructions assume, are similar drive types (such as SATA) use, have access to a few cages or disk carrier and a significant amount of time to copy the data.

(1) Remove the floppy disk that you want to use, copy from the system, and place it in a cage. This step is optional.

2. Set your secondary hard drive in a cage.

3. Boot the system with a LiveCD. This allows you to unmount the disk to which you plan to clone, which is crucial for a successful clone.

(4) To open A few terminals. In a terminal Su to root or with sudo execute the following command:
Tail-f / var/log/messages
This will open a current window from your messages file, which is important for the provision, which drives are where and all error messages are logged during the dd process in the console. / var/log/messages is the default location for most operating systems. Check if it is the same for you.

5. Plug in your source drive and watch the log file for the name assigned. For example, it will pop-up if it is a SATA drive and connected there is no other drives most likely as SDB. (If your drive away, it is likely/dev/sda.)

(6) Plug in the second drive and write its name. In my case was it / dev/sdc.

(7) If you need to format the new drive, now is the time. Create a single partition, and ensure that you choose ext4 as the file type. Once the drive is ready, lift providing both drives.

(8) In a terminal as root, run the following:
DD if = source drive from = destination drive
So:
Dd if = / dev/sdb of = / dev/SDC
Go and prepare Thanksgiving dinner (and may get a leg up on Christmas dinner you have a large disk).

(9) Once the copy is complete (and you know, the command prompt because back come), install your new hard drive in your computer and boot it up.

Good luck!

Image by flikr Melvin Schlubman

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[ Thanks to James Maguire for this link. ]

"In what may turn out to be Novell's final earnings report as a public company, revenues continued to fall as the company is set to be acquired.

"Enterprise software vendor Novell (NASDAQ:NOVL) is on the verge of being acquired for $2.2 billion by Attachmate. For its fourth quarter fiscal 2010, Novell reported net revenue of $207 million which is a decline from the $216 million in net revenue reported for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2009. Analysts polled by Thompson Reuters had expected revenue of $204.1 million. Novell declined to provide its own guidance at the end of the third quarter for the fourth quarter outlook."

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Why and How I Join the Cloud Hype, and So Can You, Free Culture Amigos!
Dec 4, 2010, 23 :02 UTC (1 Talkback[s]) (1510 reads)
(Other stories by HUNG Chao-Kuei)

[ Thanks to Chao-Kuei Hung for this link. ]

"For those of us who have been using GNU/Linux, full-steam cloud computing began with ssh -X or VNC long time ago. For those of us who have contributed to Wikipedia or OpenClipArt or OpenStreetMap, the real benefit of cloud computing lies in the web 2.0 / read-write / prosumer / Pro-Am culture that emphasizes transparency, democracy, freedom of speech, collaboration, etc. Yet recent hypes smelling suspiciously of excessive commercial interest seem to mislead the general public away from the true values of cloud computing and into expensive software products that might lock in users. Lacking an exact and precise source of confusion to debunk the hype, I suggest that fellow advocates of the free culture movement jump on the cloud bandwagon and compete with the hype generator(s?) for the seat behind the steering wheel, popularizing the free culture concepts during the competition, as a peaceful way of fighting the cloud hypes.

"In response to readers' suggestion to look at the cloud hype, I first wrote in May about Microsoft and Taiwan government's collaboration to invest 2.4*10^10 NT dollars smelling badly of corporate greed exploiting public ignorance while feeding on government resources. Seeing that the hype in Taiwan grows stronger and stronger each day, I wrote two blog articles in Chinese ( SaaS and PaaS history) and received some attention. Then I pasted the blog articles into a paper (Chinese) and presented it in one of the many academic cloud conferences. Later Carla Schroder of LinuxToday wrote a piece Keep Your Cloud, I'm a Customer Not a Consumer and I realized that the extensive hype is not limited to Taiwan alone. So I decided that the paper is worth translating into English (with slight modifications), as: "A Brief History of Cloud Computing (Before the Commercial Hype) and Purchasing Suggestions"."

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